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authorMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>2009-09-21 17:02:44 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-09-22 07:17:34 -0700
commit0d3d062a6e289e065bd0aa537a6806a1806bf8aa (patch)
tree9895e9cb48674d072885af3424e1ef145ec81f28 /Documentation/trace
parente0fff1bd12469c45dab088e353d8882761387bb6 (diff)
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>
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