* Andrew Morton <[email protected]> wrote:
> This is a pretty major bugfix.
>
> GFP_NOIO and GFP_NOFS callers should have been spending really large
> amounts of time stuck in that sleep.
>
> I wonder why nobody noticed this happening. Either a) it turns out
> that kswapd is doing a good job and such callers don't do direct
> reclaim much or b) nobody is doing any in-depth kernel
> instrumentation.
[ Oh, it's Friday already, so soapbox time i guess. The easily offended
please skip this mail ;-) ]
People _have_ noticed, and we often ignored them. I can see four
fundamental, structural problems:
1) A certain lack of competitive pressure. An MM is too complex and
there is no "better Linux MM" to compare against objectively. The
BSDs are way too different and it's easy to dismiss even objective
comparisons due to the real complexity of the differences. Heck,
2.6.9 is "way too different" and we routinely reject bugreports from
such old kernels and lose vital feedback.
2) There is a wide-spread mentality of "you prove that there is a
problem" in the MM and elsewhere in the Linux kernel too. While of
course objective proof is paramount, we often "hide" behind our
self-created complexity of the system (without malice and without
realising it!). We've seen that happen in the updatedb discussions
and the swap-prefetch discussions. The correct approach would be for
the MM folks to be able to tell for just about any workload "this is
not our problem", and to have the benefit of the doubt _on the
tester's side_. We must not ignore people who tell us that "there is
something wrong going on here", just because they are unable to
analyze it themselves. Very often where we end up saying "we dont
know what's going on here" it's likely _our_ fault. We also must not
hide behind "please do these 10 easy steps and 2 kernel recompiles
and 10 reboots, only takes half a day, and come back to us once you
have the detailed debug data" requests. Instrumentation must be _on
by default_ (like SCHED_DEBUG is on by default), which brings us to:
3) Instrumentation and tools. Instrumentation (for example MM delay
statistics - like the scheduler delay statistics) give an objective
measure to compare kernels against each other. _Smart_ and _easy to
use_ and _default enabled_ instrumentation is a must. Not "turn on
these 3 zillion kernel options" which no distro enables. Debug
tools/scripts that use the instrumentation, that just have to be run
and produce meaningful output based on which 90% of the workloads can
be analyzed _without having to ask the user to do more_. (See
PowerTop as an example, the right kind of instrumentation can do
wonders that enables users to help us. We worked hard to lower the
cost of /proc/timer_stats so that distros can enable it by default -
and now they do enable it by default.)
4) The use of heuristics and the resulting inevitable nondeterminism in
the MM. I guess i'm biased about this, doing -rt and CFS, but we've
seen that happen with the scheduler: users _love_ determinism. (Users
dont typically care whether a click on the desktop takes 0.5 seconds
or 1.0 second - as long as it's always 0.5 or always 1.0. What they
do notice is when a click takes 0.5 seconds most of the time but
occasionally it takes 1.5 seconds - _that_ they report as a
regression. They would actually prefer it to take 1.0 seconds all the
time. The reason is human psychology: 99% of our daily routine is
driven by inconscious brain automatisms. We auto-pilot through most
of the day - and that very much covers routine computer/desktop usage
too. Unpredictable/noisy behavior of the computer forces the human
brain back into more consious activity, which is perceived as a
negative thing: it's a distraction takes capacity away from
_important_ conscious activities ... such as getting real work done
on the computer.)
Heuristics is also an objective problem for the code itself: it
introduces artificial coupling of workloads and raises complexity
artificially: it makes it very hard to prove the impact of changes
(even with good instrumentation) - thus increasing the barrier of
entry significantly. (both to external contributors and to existing
maintainers)
all in one: the barrier of entry to _providing meaningful feedback_ is
often very high, and thus the barrier of entry of experimental patches
is too high too. These two factors are a lethal combination that lure us
into the false perception that everything is fine and that the yelling
out there is just from clueless whiners who are not willing to help us
:-/
Yes, MM testing is hard (in fact, good MM instrumentation and tooling is
_very_ hard), and the MM is in a pretty good shape (otherwise an
alternative would have shown up already), and today's MM is clearly the
best ever Linux MM - but still we have to solve these structural
problems if we want to advance to the next level of quality.
The solution? I think it's not that hard: we should lower the acceptance
barrier of instrumentation patches massively. (maybe even merge them
outside the normal merge window, like we merge cleanups) Then we should
only allow high-rate changes in risky kernel subsystems that improve
their own instrumentation and tools sufficiently for ordinary users to
be able to tell whether the changes are an improvement or not. Every
time there's a major regression that was hard to debug via the existing
instrumentation, mandate the extension of instrumentation to cover that
case too.
This all couples the desire of developers to add new code with the
desire of testers to provide feedback and with the desire of actual
users to have a proven good system.
Ingo
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