Commit Graph

5 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Andi Kleen
6e44f12ba6 [PATCH] i386: add memory clobbers to syscall macros
As noted by matz@suse.de

The problem is, that on i386 the syscallN
macro is defined like so:

  long __res; \
  __asm__ volatile ("int $0x80" \
        : "=a" (__res) \
        : "0" (__NR_##name),"b" ((long)(arg1)),"c" ((long)(arg2)), \
          "d" ((long)(arg3)),"S" ((long)(arg4)),"D" ((long)(arg5))); \

If one of the arguments (in the _llseek syscall it's the arg4) is a pointer
which the syscall is expected to write to (to the memory pointed to by this
ptr), then this side-effect is not captured in the asm.

If anyone uses this macro to define it's own version of the syscall
(sometimes necessary when not using glibc) and it's inlined, then GCC
doesn't know that this asm write to "*dest", when called like so for instance:

  out = 1;
  llseek (fd, bla, blubb, &out, trara)
  use (out);

Here nobody tells GCC that "out" actually is written to (just a pointer to it
is passed to the asm).  Hence GCC might (and in the above bug did)
copy-propagate "1" into the second use of "out".

The easiest solution would be to add a "memory" clobber to the definition
of this syscall macro.  As this is a syscall, it shouldn't inhibit too many
optimizations.

Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-09-12 10:50:55 -07:00
Robert Love
0eeca28300 [PATCH] inotify
inotify is intended to correct the deficiencies of dnotify, particularly
its inability to scale and its terrible user interface:

        * dnotify requires the opening of one fd per each directory
          that you intend to watch. This quickly results in too many
          open files and pins removable media, preventing unmount.
        * dnotify is directory-based. You only learn about changes to
          directories. Sure, a change to a file in a directory affects
          the directory, but you are then forced to keep a cache of
          stat structures.
        * dnotify's interface to user-space is awful.  Signals?

inotify provides a more usable, simple, powerful solution to file change
notification:

        * inotify's interface is a system call that returns a fd, not SIGIO.
	  You get a single fd, which is select()-able.
        * inotify has an event that says "the filesystem that the item
          you were watching is on was unmounted."
        * inotify can watch directories or files.

Inotify is currently used by Beagle (a desktop search infrastructure),
Gamin (a FAM replacement), and other projects.

See Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt.

Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-07-12 20:38:38 -07:00
Jens Axboe
22e2c507c3 [PATCH] Update cfq io scheduler to time sliced design
This updates the CFQ io scheduler to the new time sliced design (cfq
v3).  It provides full process fairness, while giving excellent
aggregate system throughput even for many competing processes.  It
supports io priorities, either inherited from the cpu nice value or set
directly with the ioprio_get/set syscalls.  The latter closely mimic
set/getpriority.

This import is based on my latest from -mm.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-06-27 14:33:29 -07:00
Martin Hicks
753ee72896 [PATCH] VM: early zone reclaim
This is the core of the (much simplified) early reclaim.  The goal of this
patch is to reclaim some easily-freed pages from a zone before falling back
onto another zone.

One of the major uses of this is NUMA machines.  With the default allocator
behavior the allocator would look for memory in another zone, which might be
off-node, before trying to reclaim from the current zone.

This adds a zone tuneable to enable early zone reclaim.  It is selected on a
per-zone basis and is turned on/off via syscall.

Adding some extra throttling on the reclaim was also required (patch
4/4).  Without the machine would grind to a crawl when doing a "make -j"
kernel build.  Even with this patch the System Time is higher on
average, but it seems tolerable.  Here are some numbers for kernbench
runs on a 2-node, 4cpu, 8Gig RAM Altix in the "make -j" run:

			wall  user   sys   %cpu  ctx sw.  sleeps
			----  ----   ---   ----   ------  ------
No patch		1009  1384   847   258   298170   504402
w/patch, no reclaim     880   1376   667   288   254064   396745
w/patch & reclaim       1079  1385   926   252   291625   548873

These numbers are the average of 2 runs of 3 "make -j" runs done right
after system boot.  Run-to-run variability for "make -j" is huge, so
these numbers aren't terribly useful except to seee that with reclaim
the benchmark still finishes in a reasonable amount of time.

I also looked at the NUMA hit/miss stats for the "make -j" runs and the
reclaim doesn't make any difference when the machine is thrashing away.

Doing a "make -j8" on a single node that is filled with page cache pages
takes 700 seconds with reclaim turned on and 735 seconds without reclaim
(due to remote memory accesses).

The simple zone_reclaim syscall program is at
http://www.bork.org/~mort/sgi/zone_reclaim.c

Signed-off-by: Martin Hicks <mort@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-06-21 18:46:14 -07:00
Linus Torvalds
1da177e4c3 Linux-2.6.12-rc2
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.

Let it rip!
2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00