tree 9895e9cb48674d072885af3424e1ef145ec81f28
parent e0fff1bd12469c45dab088e353d8882761387bb6
author Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> 1253577764 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1253629054 -0700

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.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Larry Woodman <lwoodman@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Li Ming Chun <macli@brc.ubc.ca>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>