What do people think of the overall design and direction? There's documentation describing the design in the first patch of the series and the second patch has the API in ktask.h.
Thanks, Daniel Changelog: v2 -> v3: - Changed cpu to CPU in the ktask Documentation, as suggested by Randy Dunlap - Saved more boot time now that Pavel Tatashin's deferred struct page init patches are in mainline (https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/10/13/692). New performance results in patch 7. - Added resource limits, per-node and system-wide, to maintain efficient concurrency levels (addresses a concern from my Plumbers talk) - ktask no longer allocates memory internally during a task so it can be used in sensitive contexts - Added the option to run work anywhere on the system rather than always confining it to a specific node - Updated Documentation patch with these changes and reworked motivation section v1 -> v2: - Added deferred struct page initialization use case. - Explained the source of the performance improvement from parallelizing clear_gigantic_page (comment from Dave Hansen). - Fixed Documentation and build warnings from CONFIG_KTASK=n kernels. My Linux Plumbers Unconference Talk: https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2017/ocw/proposals/4837 (please ignore OpenID's misapprehension that James Bottomley was speaker) ktask is a generic framework for parallelizing CPU-intensive work in the kernel. The intended use is for big machines that can use their CPU power to speed up large tasks that can't otherwise be multithreaded in userland. The API is generic enough to add concurrency to many different kinds of tasks--for example, zeroing a range of pages or evicting a list of inodes--and aims to save its clients the trouble of splitting up the work, choosing the number of threads to use, starting these threads, and load balancing the work between them. This patchset is based on 4.15-rc2 plus one mmots fix[*] and contains three ktask users: - deferred struct page initialization at boot time - clearing gigantic pages - fallocate for HugeTLB pages Work in progress: - Parallelizing page freeing in the exit/munmap paths - CPU hotplug support The core ktask code is based on work by Pavel Tatashin, Steve Sistare, and Jonathan Adams. ktask v1 RFC: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/7/14/666 ktask v2 RFC: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/24/801 [*] http://ozlabs.org/~akpm/mmots/broken-out/mm-split-deferred_init_range-into-initializing-and-freeing-parts.patch Daniel Jordan (7): ktask: add documentation ktask: multithread CPU-intensive kernel work ktask: add /proc/sys/debug/ktask_max_threads mm: enlarge type of offset argument in mem_map_offset and mem_map_next mm: parallelize clear_gigantic_page hugetlbfs: parallelize hugetlbfs_fallocate with ktask mm: parallelize deferred struct page initialization within each node Documentation/core-api/index.rst | 1 + Documentation/core-api/ktask.rst | 173 ++++++++++++ fs/hugetlbfs/inode.c | 116 ++++++-- include/linux/ktask.h | 255 ++++++++++++++++++ include/linux/ktask_internal.h | 22 ++ include/linux/mm.h | 6 + init/Kconfig | 12 + init/main.c | 2 + kernel/Makefile | 2 +- kernel/ktask.c | 556 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ kernel/sysctl.c | 10 + mm/internal.h | 7 +- mm/memory.c | 35 ++- mm/page_alloc.c | 78 ++++-- 14 files changed, 1226 insertions(+), 49 deletions(-) create mode 100644 Documentation/core-api/ktask.rst create mode 100644 include/linux/ktask.h create mode 100644 include/linux/ktask_internal.h create mode 100644 kernel/ktask.c -- 2.15.0