The remaining counters in page_state after the zoned VM counter patches
have been applied are all just for show in /proc/vmstat. They have no
essential function for the VM.
We use a simple increment of per cpu variables. In order to avoid the most
severe races we disable preempt. Preempt does not prevent the race between
an increment and an interrupt handler incrementing the same statistics
counter. However, that race is exceedingly rare, we may only loose one
increment or so and there is no requirement (at least not in kernel) that
the vm event counters have to be accurate.
In the non preempt case this results in a simple increment for each
counter. For many architectures this will be reduced by the compiler to a
single instruction. This single instruction is atomic for i386 and x86_64.
And therefore even the rare race condition in an interrupt is avoided for
both architectures in most cases.
The patchset also adds an off switch for embedded systems that allows a
building of linux kernels without these counters.
The implementation of these counters is through inline code that hopefully
results in only a single instruction increment instruction being emitted
(i386, x86_64) or in the increment being hidden though instruction
concurrency (EPIC architectures such as ia64 can get that done).
Benefits:
- VM event counter operations usually reduce to a single inline instruction
on i386 and x86_64.
- No interrupt disable, only preempt disable for the preempt case.
Preempt disable can also be avoided by moving the counter into a spinlock.
- Handling is similar to zoned VM counters.
- Simple and easily extendable.
- Can be omitted to reduce memory use for embedded use.
References:
RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113512330605497&w=2
RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114988082814934&w=2
local_t http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114991748606690&w=2
V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115014808400007&r=1&w=2
V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767022346&w=2
V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115047968808926&w=2
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Christoph Lameter