mm, x86: Saving vmcore with non-lazy freeing of vmas

During the reading of /proc/vmcore the kernel is doing
ioremap()/iounmap() repeatedly. And the buildup of un-flushed
vm_area_struct's is causing a great deal of overhead. (rb_next()
is chewing up most of that time).

This solution is to provide function set_iounmap_nonlazy(). It
causes a subsequent call to iounmap() to immediately purge the
vma area (with try_purge_vmap_area_lazy()).

With this patch we have seen the time for writing a 250MB
compressed dump drop from 71 seconds to 44 seconds.

Signed-off-by: Cliff Wickman <cpw@sgi.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: kexec@lists.infradead.org
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
LKML-Reference: <E1OwHZ4-0005WK-Tw@eag09.americas.sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/vmalloc.c b/mm/vmalloc.c
index 6b8889da69a6..d8087f0db507 100644
--- a/mm/vmalloc.c
+++ b/mm/vmalloc.c
@@ -517,6 +517,15 @@ static atomic_t vmap_lazy_nr = ATOMIC_INIT(0);
 static void purge_fragmented_blocks_allcpus(void);
 
 /*
+ * called before a call to iounmap() if the caller wants vm_area_struct's
+ * immediately freed.
+ */
+void set_iounmap_nonlazy(void)
+{
+        atomic_set(&vmap_lazy_nr, lazy_max_pages()+1);
+}
+
+/*
  * Purges all lazily-freed vmap areas.
  *
  * If sync is 0 then don't purge if there is already a purge in progress.