Specifying a non-zero value for a new struct kmem_cache_args field
sheaf_capacity will setup a caching layer of percpu arrays called
sheaves of given capacity for the created cache.
Allocations from the cache will allocate via the percpu sheaves (main or
spare) as long as they have no NUMA node preference. Frees will also
put the object back into one of the sheaves.
When both percpu sheaves are found empty during an allocation, an empty
sheaf may be replaced with a full one from the per-node barn. If none
are available and the allocation is allowed to block, an empty sheaf is
refilled from slab(s) by an internal bulk alloc operation. When both
percpu sheaves are full during freeing, the barn can replace a full one
with an empty one, unless over a full sheaves limit. In that case a
sheaf is flushed to slab(s) by an internal bulk free operation. Flushing
sheaves and barns is also wired to the existing cpu flushing and cache
shrinking operations.
The sheaves do not distinguish NUMA locality of the cached objects. If
an allocation is requested with kmem_cache_alloc_node() (or a mempolicy
with strict_numa mode enabled) with a specific node (not NUMA_NO_NODE),
the sheaves are bypassed.
The bulk operations exposed to slab users also try to utilize the
sheaves as long as the necessary (full or empty) sheaves are available
on the cpu or in the barn. Once depleted, they will fallback to bulk
alloc/free to slabs directly to avoid double copying.
The sheaf_capacity value is exported in sysfs for observability.
Sysfs CONFIG_SLUB_STATS counters alloc_cpu_sheaf and free_cpu_sheaf
count objects allocated or freed using the sheaves (and thus not
counting towards the other alloc/free path counters). Counters
sheaf_refill and sheaf_flush count objects filled or flushed from or to
slab pages, and can be used to assess how effective the caching is. The
refill and flush operations will also count towards the usual
alloc_fastpath/slowpath, free_fastpath/slowpath and other counters for
the backing slabs. For barn operations, barn_get and barn_put count how
many full sheaves were get from or put to the barn, the _fail variants
count how many such requests could not be satisfied mainly because the
barn was either empty or full. While the barn also holds empty sheaves
to make some operations easier, these are not as critical to mandate own
counters. Finally, there are sheaf_alloc/sheaf_free counters.
Access to the percpu sheaves is protected by local_trylock() when
potential callers include irq context, and local_lock() otherwise (such
as when we already know the gfp flags allow blocking). The trylock
failures should be rare and we can easily fallback. Each per-NUMA-node
barn has a spin_lock.
When slub_debug is enabled for a cache with sheaf_capacity also
specified, the latter is ignored so that allocations and frees reach the
slow path where debugging hooks are processed. Similarly, we ignore it
with CONFIG_SLUB_TINY which prefers low memory usage to performance.