[RFC PATCH v1 0/3] kdump, vmcore: Map vmcore memory in direct mapping region

[HATAYAMA Daisuke]

From: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal at redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/3] kdump, vmcore: Map vmcore memory in direct mapping region
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:13:48 -0500

> On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 08:59:34PM +0900, HATAYAMA Daisuke wrote:
>> Currently, kdump reads the 1st kernel's memory, called old memory in
>> the source code, using ioremap per a single page. This causes big
>> performance degradation since page tables modification and tlb flush
>> happen each time the single page is read.
>> 
>> This issue turned out from Cliff's kernel-space filtering work.
>> 
>> To avoid calling ioremap, we map a whole 1st kernel's memory targeted
>> as vmcore regions in direct mapping table. By this we got big
>> performance improvement. See the following simple benchmark.
>> 
>> Machine spec:
>> 
>> | CPU    | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7- 4820  @ 2.00GHz (4 sockets, 8 cores) (*) |
>> | Memory | 32 GB                                                             |
>> | Kernel | 3.7 vanilla and with this patch set                               |
>> 
>>  (*) only 1 cpu is used in the 2nd kenrel now.
>> 
>> Benchmark:
>> 
>> I executed the following commands on the 2nd kernel and recorded real
>> time.
>> 
>>   $ time dd bs=$((4096 * n)) if=/proc/vmcore of=/dev/null
>> 
>> [3.7 vanilla]
>> 
>> | block size | time      | performance |
>> |       [KB] |           | [MB/sec]    |
>> |------------+-----------+-------------|
>> |          4 | 5m 46.97s | 93.56       |
>> |          8 | 4m 20.68s | 124.52      |
>> |         16 | 3m 37.85s | 149.01      |
>> 
>> [3.7 with this patch]
>> 
>> | block size | time   | performance |
>> |       [KB] |        |    [GB/sec] |
>> |------------+--------+-------------|
>> |          4 | 17.59s |        1.85 |
>> |          8 | 14.73s |        2.20 |
>> |         16 | 14.26s |        2.28 |
>> |         32 | 13.38s |        2.43 |
>> |         64 | 12.77s |        2.54 |
>> |        128 | 12.41s |        2.62 |
>> |        256 | 12.50s |        2.60 |
>> |        512 | 12.37s |        2.62 |
>> |       1024 | 12.30s |        2.65 |
>> |       2048 | 12.29s |        2.64 |
>> |       4096 | 12.32s |        2.63 |
>> 
> 
> These are impressive improvements. I missed the discussion on mmap().
> So why couldn't we provide mmap() interface for /proc/vmcore. If that
> works then application can select to mmap/unmap bigger chunks of file
> (instead ioremap mapping/remapping a page at a time). 
> 
> And if application controls the size of mapping, then it can vary the
> size of mapping based on available amount of free memory. That way if
> somebody reserves less amount of memory, we could still dump but with
> some time penalty.
> 

mmap() needs user-space page table in addition to kernel-space's, and
it looks that remap_pfn_range() that creates the user-space page
table, doesn't support large pages, only 4KB pages. If mmaping small
chunks only for small memory programming, then we would again face the
same issue as with ioremap. I don't know whether hugetlbfs supports
mmap and 1GB page now.

Another idea to reduce size of page table is to extend mapping ranges
to cover a whole memory as many 1GB pages as possible. For example,
supporse M is size of system memory, then total size of PGD and PUD
pages to cover M is:

   ( 1  +  roundup(M, 512GB) / 512GB ) * PAGE_SIZE
     ~     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     ^                 ^
     |                 |
  PGD page         PUD pages

Ideally, 2TB system can be covered with 20KB and 16TB with 132KB only.

So I first want to evaluate this logic. Although I've not seen
actually yet, I expect most of memory maps on tera-byte memory
machines consists of 1GB-aligned huge chunks.

Thanks.
HATAYAMA, Daisuke