tracing, page-allocator: add trace event for page traffic related to the buddy lists
The page allocation trace event reports that a page was successfully
allocated but it does not specify where it came from. When analysing
performance, it can be important to distinguish between pages coming from
the per-cpu allocator and pages coming from the buddy lists as the latter
requires the zone lock to the taken and more data structures to be
examined.
This patch adds a trace event for __rmqueue reporting when a page is being
allocated from the buddy lists. It distinguishes between being called to
refill the per-cpu lists or whether it is a high-order allocation.
Similarly, this patch adds an event to catch when the PCP lists are being
drained a little and pages are going back to the buddy lists.
This is trickier to draw conclusions from but high activity on those
events could explain why there were a large number of cache misses on a
page-allocator-intensive workload. The coalescing and splitting of
buddies involves a lot of writing of page metadata and cache line bounces
not to mention the acquisition of an interrupt-safe lock necessary to
enter this path.
[[email protected]: fix build]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>
Cc: Larry Woodman <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Li Ming Chun <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
2 files changed