kernel_optimize_test/mm
Christopher Yeoh fcf634098c Cross Memory Attach
The basic idea behind cross memory attach is to allow MPI programs doing
intra-node communication to do a single copy of the message rather than a
double copy of the message via shared memory.

The following patch attempts to achieve this by allowing a destination
process, given an address and size from a source process, to copy memory
directly from the source process into its own address space via a system
call.  There is also a symmetrical ability to copy from the current
process's address space into a destination process's address space.

- Use of /proc/pid/mem has been considered, but there are issues with
  using it:
  - Does not allow for specifying iovecs for both src and dest, assuming
    preadv or pwritev was implemented either the area read from or
  written to would need to be contiguous.
  - Currently mem_read allows only processes who are currently
  ptrace'ing the target and are still able to ptrace the target to read
  from the target. This check could possibly be moved to the open call,
  but its not clear exactly what race this restriction is stopping
  (reason  appears to have been lost)
  - Having to send the fd of /proc/self/mem via SCM_RIGHTS on unix
  domain socket is a bit ugly from a userspace point of view,
  especially when you may have hundreds if not (eventually) thousands
  of processes  that all need to do this with each other
  - Doesn't allow for some future use of the interface we would like to
  consider adding in the future (see below)
  - Interestingly reading from /proc/pid/mem currently actually
  involves two copies! (But this could be fixed pretty easily)

As mentioned previously use of vmsplice instead was considered, but has
problems.  Since you need the reader and writer working co-operatively if
the pipe is not drained then you block.  Which requires some wrapping to
do non blocking on the send side or polling on the receive.  In all to all
communication it requires ordering otherwise you can deadlock.  And in the
example of many MPI tasks writing to one MPI task vmsplice serialises the
copying.

There are some cases of MPI collectives where even a single copy interface
does not get us the performance gain we could.  For example in an
MPI_Reduce rather than copy the data from the source we would like to
instead use it directly in a mathops (say the reduce is doing a sum) as
this would save us doing a copy.  We don't need to keep a copy of the data
from the source.  I haven't implemented this, but I think this interface
could in the future do all this through the use of the flags - eg could
specify the math operation and type and the kernel rather than just
copying the data would apply the specified operation between the source
and destination and store it in the destination.

Although we don't have a "second user" of the interface (though I've had
some nibbles from people who may be interested in using it for intra
process messaging which is not MPI).  This interface is something which
hardware vendors are already doing for their custom drivers to implement
fast local communication.  And so in addition to this being useful for
OpenMPI it would mean the driver maintainers don't have to fix things up
when the mm changes.

There was some discussion about how much faster a true zero copy would
go. Here's a link back to the email with some testing I did on that:

http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=130105930902915&w=2

There is a basic man page for the proposed interface here:

http://ozlabs.org/~cyeoh/cma/process_vm_readv.txt

This has been implemented for x86 and powerpc, other architecture should
mainly (I think) just need to add syscall numbers for the process_vm_readv
and process_vm_writev. There are 32 bit compatibility versions for
64-bit kernels.

For arch maintainers there are some simple tests to be able to quickly
verify that the syscalls are working correctly here:

http://ozlabs.org/~cyeoh/cma/cma-test-20110718.tgz

Signed-off-by: Chris Yeoh <yeohc@au1.ibm.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Cc: <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-10-31 17:30:44 -07:00
..
backing-dev.c mm: Add comment explaining task state setting in bdi_forker_thread() 2011-09-02 17:17:02 -06:00
bootmem.c crash_dump: export is_kdump_kernel to modules, consolidate elfcorehdr_addr, setup_elfcorehdr and saved_max_pfn 2011-03-23 19:47:19 -07:00
bounce.c bounce: call flush_dcache_page() after bounce_copy_vec() 2010-09-09 18:57:25 -07:00
cleancache.c mm: cleancache core ops functions and config 2011-05-26 10:01:36 -06:00
compaction.c mm: compaction: abort compaction if too many pages are isolated and caller is asynchronous V2 2011-06-15 20:04:02 -07:00
debug-pagealloc.c
dmapool.c devres: fix possible use after free 2011-07-25 20:57:14 -07:00
fadvise.c readahead: introduce FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
failslab.c fault-injection: add ability to export fault_attr in arbitrary directory 2011-08-03 14:25:20 -10:00
filemap_xip.c mm: Convert i_mmap_lock to a mutex 2011-05-25 08:39:18 -07:00
filemap.c vfs: iov_iter: have iov_iter_advance decrement nr_segs appropriately 2011-10-28 13:55:08 +02:00
fremap.c mm: don't access vm_flags as 'int' 2011-05-26 09:20:31 -07:00
highmem.c mm: make HASHED_PAGE_VIRTUAL page_address' struct page argument const. 2011-08-17 13:00:20 -07:00
huge_memory.c mm/huge_memory.c: minor lock simplification in __khugepaged_exit 2011-07-25 20:57:09 -07:00
hugetlb.c mm: hugetlb: fix coding style issues 2011-07-25 20:57:09 -07:00
hwpoison-inject.c Fix common misspellings 2011-03-31 11:26:23 -03:00
init-mm.c atomic: use <linux/atomic.h> 2011-07-26 16:49:47 -07:00
internal.h mm: nommu: sort mm->mmap list properly 2011-05-25 08:39:05 -07:00
Kconfig mm Kconfig typo: cleancacne -> cleancache 2011-06-10 14:47:52 +02:00
Kconfig.debug mm: debug-pagealloc: fix kconfig dependency warning 2011-03-22 17:44:02 -07:00
kmemcheck.c kmemcheck: Fix build errors due to missing slab.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
kmemleak-test.c kmemleak: remove memset by using kzalloc 2011-01-27 18:31:51 +00:00
kmemleak.c atomic: use <linux/atomic.h> 2011-07-26 16:49:47 -07:00
ksm.c ksm: fix NULL pointer dereference in scan_get_next_rmap_item() 2011-06-15 20:04:02 -07:00
maccess.c maccess,probe_kernel: Make write/read src const void * 2011-05-25 19:56:23 -04:00
madvise.c fs: kill i_alloc_sem 2011-07-20 20:47:46 -04:00
Makefile Cross Memory Attach 2011-10-31 17:30:44 -07:00
memblock.c mm/memblock.c: avoid abuse of RED_INACTIVE 2011-07-25 20:57:09 -07:00
memcontrol.c memcg: Revert "memcg: add memory.vmscan_stat" 2011-09-14 18:09:38 -07:00
memory_hotplug.c mm: extend memory hotplug API to allow memory hotplug in virtual machines 2011-07-25 20:57:08 -07:00
memory-failure.c HWPoison: add memory_failure_queue() 2011-08-03 11:15:58 -04:00
memory.c mm/futex: fix futex writes on archs with SW tracking of dirty & young 2011-07-25 20:57:11 -07:00
mempolicy.c mm/mempolicy.c: make copy_from_user() provably correct 2011-09-14 18:09:36 -07:00
mempool.c mm: remove broken 'kzalloc' mempool 2009-09-22 07:17:35 -07:00
migrate.c mm: fix race between mremap and removing migration entry 2011-10-19 23:42:58 -07:00
mincore.c mm: clarify the radix_tree exceptional cases 2011-08-03 14:25:24 -10:00
mlock.c mm: don't access vm_flags as 'int' 2011-05-26 09:20:31 -07:00
mm_init.c
mmap.c mmap: fix and tidy up overcommit page arithmetic 2011-07-25 20:57:09 -07:00
mmu_context.c exit: fix oops in sync_mm_rss 2010-03-24 16:31:21 -07:00
mmu_notifier.c thp: mmu_notifier_test_young 2011-01-13 17:32:46 -08:00
mmzone.c mm: page allocator: adjust the per-cpu counter threshold when memory is low 2011-01-13 17:32:31 -08:00
mprotect.c thp: mprotect: transparent huge page support 2011-01-13 17:32:44 -08:00
mremap.c mm: Convert i_mmap_lock to a mutex 2011-05-25 08:39:18 -07:00
msync.c sanitize vfs_fsync calling conventions 2010-05-21 18:31:21 -04:00
nobootmem.c memblock/nobootmem: remove unneeded code from alloc_bootmem_node_high() 2011-05-25 08:39:31 -07:00
nommu.c mmap: fix and tidy up overcommit page arithmetic 2011-07-25 20:57:09 -07:00
oom_kill.c oom: task->mm == NULL doesn't mean the memory was freed 2011-08-01 15:24:12 -10:00
page_alloc.c fault-injection: add ability to export fault_attr in arbitrary directory 2011-08-03 14:25:20 -10:00
page_cgroup.c mm: Convert vmalloc/memset to vzalloc 2011-09-15 13:56:56 +02:00
page_io.c block: kill off REQ_UNPLUG 2011-03-10 08:52:27 +01:00
page_isolation.c mm: page_isolation: codeclean fix comment and rm unneeded val init 2010-10-26 16:52:11 -07:00
page-writeback.c squeeze max-pause area and drop pass-good area 2011-08-19 22:42:07 +08:00
pagewalk.c pagewalk: fix code comment for THP 2011-07-25 20:57:09 -07:00
percpu-km.c percpu: clear memory allocated with the km allocator 2010-10-02 10:28:42 +03:00
percpu-vm.c mm: remove gfp mask from pcpu_get_vm_areas 2011-01-13 17:32:34 -08:00
percpu.c Merge branch 'for-2.6.40' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/percpu 2011-05-24 11:53:42 -07:00
pgtable-generic.c mm/pgtable-generic.c: fix CONFIG_SWAP=n build 2011-01-26 10:49:58 +10:00
prio_tree.c sanitize <linux/prefetch.h> usage 2011-05-20 12:50:29 -07:00
process_vm_access.c Cross Memory Attach 2011-10-31 17:30:44 -07:00
quicklist.c include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
readahead.c readahead: readahead page allocations are OK to fail 2011-05-25 08:39:25 -07:00
rmap.c Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/writeback 2011-07-26 10:39:54 -07:00
shmem.c Merge branch 'next-evm' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/zohar/ima-2.6 into next 2011-08-09 10:31:03 +10:00
slab.c mm: restrict access to slab files under procfs and sysfs 2011-09-27 22:59:27 +03:00
slob.c atomic: use <linux/atomic.h> 2011-07-26 16:49:47 -07:00
slub.c Merge branches 'slab/next' and 'slub/partial' into slab/for-linus 2011-10-26 18:09:12 +03:00
sparse-vmemmap.c tree-wide: fix comment/printk typos 2010-11-01 15:38:34 -04:00
sparse.c mm: make some struct page's const 2011-07-25 20:57:07 -07:00
swap_state.c block: remove per-queue plugging 2011-03-10 08:52:07 +01:00
swap.c mm: batch activate_page() to reduce lock contention 2011-05-25 08:39:37 -07:00
swapfile.c mm: let swap use exceptional entries 2011-08-03 14:25:22 -10:00
thrash.c mm: swap-token: add a comment for priority aging 2011-07-25 20:57:08 -07:00
truncate.c mm: a few small updates for radix-swap 2011-08-03 14:25:24 -10:00
util.c mm: nommu: sort mm->mmap list properly 2011-05-25 08:39:05 -07:00
vmalloc.c mm: sync vmalloc address space page tables in alloc_vm_area() 2011-09-14 18:09:38 -07:00
vmscan.c Merge branch 'master' into for-next 2011-09-15 15:08:18 +02:00
vmstat.c numa: fix NUMA compile error when sysfs and procfs are disabled 2011-09-14 18:09:37 -07:00