[PATCH] Light weight event counters

The remaining counters in page_state after the zoned VM counter patches
have been applied are all just for show in /proc/vmstat.  They have no
essential function for the VM.

We use a simple increment of per cpu variables.  In order to avoid the most
severe races we disable preempt.  Preempt does not prevent the race between
an increment and an interrupt handler incrementing the same statistics
counter.  However, that race is exceedingly rare, we may only loose one
increment or so and there is no requirement (at least not in kernel) that
the vm event counters have to be accurate.

In the non preempt case this results in a simple increment for each
counter.  For many architectures this will be reduced by the compiler to a
single instruction.  This single instruction is atomic for i386 and x86_64.
 And therefore even the rare race condition in an interrupt is avoided for
both architectures in most cases.

The patchset also adds an off switch for embedded systems that allows a
building of linux kernels without these counters.

The implementation of these counters is through inline code that hopefully
results in only a single instruction increment instruction being emitted
(i386, x86_64) or in the increment being hidden though instruction
concurrency (EPIC architectures such as ia64 can get that done).

Benefits:
- VM event counter operations usually reduce to a single inline instruction
  on i386 and x86_64.
- No interrupt disable, only preempt disable for the preempt case.
  Preempt disable can also be avoided by moving the counter into a spinlock.
- Handling is similar to zoned VM counters.
- Simple and easily extendable.
- Can be omitted to reduce memory use for embedded use.

References:

RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113512330605497&w=2
RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114988082814934&w=2
local_t http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114991748606690&w=2
V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115014808400007&r=1&w=2
V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767022346&w=2
V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115047968808926&w=2

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig
index f70f2fd273c2..f515948889a7 100644
--- a/init/Kconfig
+++ b/init/Kconfig
@@ -379,6 +379,15 @@ config SLAB
 	  SLOB is more space efficient but does not scale well and is
 	  more susceptible to fragmentation.
 
+config VM_EVENT_COUNTERS
+	default y
+	bool "Enable VM event counters for /proc/vmstat" if EMBEDDED
+	help
+	  VM event counters are only needed to for event counts to be
+	  shown. They have no function for the kernel itself. This
+	  option allows the disabling of the VM event counters.
+	  /proc/vmstat will only show page counts.
+
 endmenu		# General setup
 
 config TINY_SHMEM