0.5%, based on some quick measurements on a number of workstations and
small fileservers (including my home fileserver running simultaneous
builds of the NetBSD source tree and several NetBSD kernels). This
brings the hit rate on my machines from below 70% to above 90%. We
should be able to tune this as we run, by tracking the hit rate and
increasing the size of the cache if memory permits.
Some systems will still require significantly larger cache sizes. Some
ports -- notably the 64-bit ones -- probably should use more than 1% of
physmem as the default due to the larger size of struct vnode.
buf_mrelease(). Without this, though the pages are returned to the
relevant *pool*, they are never available for any other use in the
system.
Now the backpressure on the physical size of the buffer cache through
the buf_drain() call in the pagedaemon works correctly. If anything,
it may be a bit more aggressive than intended. On my 256MB system,
with vm.bufcache set to the default 30% of physmem, a kernel with this
fix can do 5 simultaneous config/makedep/builds of different NetBSD
kernels in 1313 seconds; with the "traditional" buffer cache code it
requires 1320 seconds. Running "find / -type d -exec ls -l {}" while
the build is going demonstrates that the backpressure is working
correctly: free memory oscillates slowly between close to none and
the UVM target free, and vmstat -m shows a large number of releases
for the buffer pools.
For future work: how is "bufpl" memory returned to the system? This
is not obvious to me (I must be looking in the wrong place). Also,
buf_mrelease() is also called from brelse() in some cases. Would it
be better to add a pool flag causing automatic release of full pages
as they become available (not fragmented)? Jason Thorpe proposed this
and it seems more elegant than cleaning the _entire_ pool only upon
memory pressure.
Greg Oster did a lot of the work of figuring this out. Jason proposed
the use of pool_reclaim as a way to fix it.
uninit function can call close again, which will try to obtain a held
lock. Unlock the lock before calling the actual close function, since
we already disassociated cm from the rest of the data structures.
are.
Cut SYSCTL_DEFSIZE in half, which results in roughly a 40% improvement
in memory usage by sysctlnodes (on my laptop), along with a dozen
extra calls to sysctl_realloc() during kernel bootstrap (which no one
should notice anyway).
