Revision 494de90098784b8e2797598cefdd34188884ec2e authored by Mel Gorman on 03 July 2008, 04:27:51 UTC, committed by Linus Torvalds on 03 July 2008, 16:22:59 UTC
The non-NUMA case of build_zonelist_cache() would initialize the
zlcache_ptr for both node_zonelists[] to NULL.

Which is problematic, since non-NUMA only has a single node_zonelists[]
entry, and trying to zero the non-existent second one just overwrote the
nr_zones field instead.

As kswapd uses this value to determine what reclaim work is necessary,
the result is that kswapd never reclaims.  This causes processes to
stall frequently in low-memory situations as they always direct reclaim.
This patch initialises zlcache_ptr correctly.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Tested-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
[ Simplified patch a bit ]
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 parent c461a97
Raw File
basic_profiling.txt
These instructions are deliberately very basic. If you want something clever,
go read the real docs ;-) Please don't add more stuff, but feel free to 
correct my mistakes ;-)    (mbligh@aracnet.com)
Thanks to John Levon, Dave Hansen, et al. for help writing this.

<test> is the thing you're trying to measure.
Make sure you have the correct System.map / vmlinux referenced!

It is probably easiest to use "make install" for linux and hack
/sbin/installkernel to copy vmlinux to /boot, in addition to vmlinuz,
config, System.map, which are usually installed by default.

Readprofile
-----------
A recent readprofile command is needed for 2.6, such as found in util-linux
2.12a, which can be downloaded from:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/

Most distributions will ship it already.

Add "profile=2" to the kernel command line.

clear		readprofile -r
		<test>
dump output	readprofile -m /boot/System.map > captured_profile

Oprofile
--------

Get the source (see Changes for required version) from
http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/ and add "idle=poll" to the kernel command
line.

Configure with CONFIG_PROFILING=y and CONFIG_OPROFILE=y & reboot on new kernel

./configure --with-kernel-support
make install

For superior results, be sure to enable the local APIC. If opreport sees
a 0Hz CPU, APIC was not on. Be aware that idle=poll may mean a performance
penalty.

One time setup:
		opcontrol --setup --vmlinux=/boot/vmlinux

clear		opcontrol --reset
start		opcontrol --start
		<test>
stop		opcontrol --stop
dump output	opreport >  output_file

To only report on the kernel, run opreport -l /boot/vmlinux > output_file

A reset is needed to clear old statistics, which survive a reboot.

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