[PATCH] makedumpfile: keep dumpfile pages in a cache

[Petr Tesarik]

Dne Po 3. září 2012 05:42:33 Atsushi Kumagai napsal(a):
> Hello Petr,
> 
> On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:49:49 +0200
> 
> Petr Tesarik <ptesarik at suse.cz> wrote:
> > Add a simple cache for pages read from the dumpfile.
> > 
> > This is a big win if we read consecutive data from one page, e.g.
> > page descriptors, or even page table entries.
> > 
> > Note that makedumpfile now always reads a complete page. This was already
> > the case with kdump-compressed and sadump formats, but makedumpfile was
> > throwing most of the data away. For the kdump-compressed case, we may
> > actually save a lot of decompression, too.
> > 
> > I tried to keep the cache small to minimize memory footprint, but it
> > should be big enough to hold all pages to do 4-level paging plus some
> > data. This is needed e.g. for vmalloc areas or Xen page frame table
> > data, which are not contiguous in physical memory.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Petr Tesarik <ptesarik at suse.cz>
> 
> It's interesting to me. I want to know how performance will be improved
> with this patch, so do you have speed measurements ?

Not really. I only measured the hit/miss ratio, and with filtering Xen domU 
and dump level 0, I got the following on a small system (2G RAM):

cache hit: 1818880  cache miss: 1873

The improvement isn't much for non-Xen case, because the hits are mostly due 
to virtual-to-physical translations, and most of Linux data is stored at 
virtual addresses that can be resolved by adding/subtracting a fixed offset.

Of course, you will also win only the syscall overhead, because Linux keeps 
the data in the kernel pagecache anyway. I'll measure the times for you on a 
reasonably large system (~256G) and send the results here.

Regards,
Petr Tesarik
SUSE Linux