Anton Blanchard authored Sep 21, 2009 and Benjamin Herrenschmidt committed Sep 24, 2009

If we are using 1TB segments and we are allowed to randomise the heap, we can
put it above 1TB so it is backed by a 1TB segment. Otherwise the heap will be
in the bottom 1TB which always uses 256MB segments and this may result in a
performance penalty.

This functionality is disabled when heap randomisation is turned off:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space

which may be useful when trying to allocate the maximum amount of 16M or 16G
pages.

On a microbenchmark that repeatedly touches 32GB of memory with a stride of
256MB + 4kB (designed to stress 256MB segments while still mapping nicely into
the L1 cache), we see the improvement:

Force malloc to use heap all the time:
# export MALLOC_MMAP_MAX_=0 MALLOC_TRIM_THRESHOLD_=-1

Disable heap randomization:
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space
# time ./test
12.51s

Enable heap randomization:
# echo 2 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space
# time ./test
1.70s

Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>