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Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Re: [PATCHES] A patch for xlog.c
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From: ncm@zembu.com (Nathan Myers)
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On Sun, Feb 25, 2001 at 11:28:46PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > It allows no backing store on disk.  

I.e. it allows you to map memory without an associated inode; the memory
may still be swapped.  Of course, there is no problem with mapping an 
inode too, so that unrelated processes can join in.  Solarix has a flag
to pin the shared pages in RAM so they can't be swapped out.

> > It is the BSD solution to SysV
> > share memory.  Here are all the BSDi flags:
> 
> >      MAP_ANON    Map anonymous memory not associated with any specific
> >                  file.  The file descriptor used for creating MAP_ANON
> >                  must be -1.  The offset parameter is ignored.
> 
> Hmm.  Now that I read down to the "nonstandard extensions" part of the
> HPUX man page for mmap(), I find
> 
>      If MAP_ANONYMOUS is set in flags:
> 
>           o    A new memory region is created and initialized to all zeros.
>                This memory region can be shared only with descendants of
>                the current process.

This is supported on Linux and BSD, but not on Solarix 7.  It's not 
necessary; you can just map /dev/zero on SysV systems that don't 
have MAP_ANON.

> While I've said before that I don't think it's really necessary for
> processes that aren't children of the postmaster to access the shared
> memory, I'm not sure that I want to go over to a mechanism that makes it
> *impossible* for that to be done.  Especially not if the only motivation
> is to avoid having to configure the kernel's shared memory settings.

There are enormous advantages to avoiding the need to configure kernel 
settings.  It makes PG a better citizen.  PG is much easier to drop in 
and use if you don't need attention from the IT department.

But I don't know of any reason to avoid mapping an actual inode,
so using mmap doesn't necessarily mean giving up sharing among
unrelated processes.

> Besides, what makes you think there's not a limit on the size of shmem
> allocatable via mmap()?

I've never seen any mmap limit documented.  Since mmap() is how 
everybody implements shared libraries, such a limit would be equivalent 
to a limit on how much/many shared libraries are used.  mmap() with 
MAP_ANONYMOUS (or its SysV /dev/zero equivalent) is a common, modern 
way to get raw storage for malloc(), so such a limit would be a limit
on malloc() too.

The mmap architecture comes to us from the Mach microkernel memory
manager, backported into BSD and then copied widely.  Since it was
the fundamental mechanism for all memory operations in Mach, arbitrary
limits would make no sense.  That it worked so well is the reason it 
was copied everywhere else, so adding arbitrary limits while copying 
it would be silly.  I don't think we'll see any systems like that.

Nathan Myers
ncm@zembu.com

From pgsql-hackers-owner+M6138@postgresql.org Mon Mar 19 07:57:59 2001
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Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 04:55:01 -0800
From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
To: Rod Taylor <rod.taylor@inquent.com>
Cc: Hackers List <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Fw: [vorbis-dev] ogg123: shared memory by mmap()
Message-ID: <20010319045500.T29888@fw.wintelcom.net>
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WOOT WOOT! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Christian Weisgerber" <naddy@mips.inka.de>
> Newsgroups: list.vorbis.dev
> To: <vorbis-dev@xiph.org>
> Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2001 12:01 PM
> Subject: [vorbis-dev] ogg123: shared memory by mmap()
> 
> 
> > The patch below adds:
> >
> > - acinclude.m4:  A new macro A_FUNC_SMMAP to check that sharing
> pages
> >   through mmap() works.  This is taken from Joerg Schilling's star.
> > - configure.in:  A_FUNC_SMMAP
> > - ogg123/buffer.c:  If we have a working mmap(), use it to create
> >   a region of shared memory instead of using System V IPC.
> >
> > Works on BSD.  Should also work on SVR4 and offspring (Solaris),
> > and Linux.

This is a really bad idea performance wise.  Solaris has a special
code path for SYSV shared memory that doesn't require tons of swap
tracking structures per-page/per-process.  FreeBSD also has this
optimization (it's off by default, but should work since FreeBSD
4.2 via the sysctl kern.ipc.shm_use_phys=1)

Both OS's use a trick of making the pages non-pageable, this allows
signifigant savings in kernel space required for each attached
process, as well as the use of large pages which reduce the amount
of TLB faults your processes will incurr.

Anyhow, if you could make this a runtime option it wouldn't be so
evil, but as a compile time option, it's a really bad idea for
Solaris and FreeBSD.

--
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org]

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From pgsql-hackers-owner+M6255@postgresql.org Tue Mar 20 18:46:33 2001
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From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
To: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Cc: Rod Taylor <rod.taylor@inquent.com>,
        Hackers List <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Fw: [vorbis-dev] ogg123: shared memory by mmap()
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* Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> [010320 14:10] wrote:
> > > > The patch below adds:
> > > >
> > > > - acinclude.m4:  A new macro A_FUNC_SMMAP to check that sharing
> > > pages
> > > >   through mmap() works.  This is taken from Joerg Schilling's star.
> > > > - configure.in:  A_FUNC_SMMAP
> > > > - ogg123/buffer.c:  If we have a working mmap(), use it to create
> > > >   a region of shared memory instead of using System V IPC.
> > > >
> > > > Works on BSD.  Should also work on SVR4 and offspring (Solaris),
> > > > and Linux.
> > 
> > This is a really bad idea performance wise.  Solaris has a special
> > code path for SYSV shared memory that doesn't require tons of swap
> > tracking structures per-page/per-process.  FreeBSD also has this
> > optimization (it's off by default, but should work since FreeBSD
> > 4.2 via the sysctl kern.ipc.shm_use_phys=1)
> 
> > 
> > Both OS's use a trick of making the pages non-pageable, this allows
> > signifigant savings in kernel space required for each attached
> > process, as well as the use of large pages which reduce the amount
> > of TLB faults your processes will incurr.
> 
> That is interesting.  BSDi has SysV shared memory as non-pagable, and I
> always thought of that as a bug.  Seems you are saying that having it
> pagable has a significant performance penalty.  Interesting.

Yes, having it pageable is actually sort of bad.

It doesn't allow you to do several important optimizations.

-- 
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org]


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From pgsql-general-owner+M14300@postgresql.org Mon Aug 27 13:07:32 2001
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Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 01:14:33 +1000
From: Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>
To: Andrew Snow <andrew@modulus.org>
cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] raw partition
Message-ID: <20010828011433.E32309@svana.org>
Reply-To: Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>
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On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 12:02:08AM +1000, Andrew Snow wrote:
> 
> What I think would be better would be moving postgresql to a system of
> using memory-mapped I/O.  instead of the shared buffer cache, files
> would be directly memory-mapped and the OS would do the caching.  I
> can't see this happening though because of platform dependancy, but I
> think its worth another look soon because many unix platforms support
> mmap().  I think it would improve the performance of disk-intensive
> tasks noticeably.

Well, this has other problems. Consider tables that are larger than your
system memory. You'd have to continuously map and unmap different sections.
That can have odd side effects (witness mozilla on linux having 15,000
mapped areas or so...)

You would still however get the advantage that you wouldn't have to copy the
data from the disk buffers to user space, you simply get the disk buffer
mapped into your address space.

I think that for commonly used tables that are under 100K in size (most of
the system tables), this is quite a workable idea. If you don't mind keeping
them mapped the whole time.

-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>
http://svana.org/kleptog/
> It would be nice if someone came up with a certification system that
> actually separated those who can barely regurgitate what they crammed over
> the last few weeks from those who command secret ninja networking powers.

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From pgsql-general-owner+M14319@postgresql.org Mon Aug 27 16:57:10 2001
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To: Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>
cc: Andrew Snow <andrew@modulus.org>, pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] raw partition 
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Comments: In-reply-to Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>
	message dated "Tue, 28 Aug 2001 01:14:33 +1000"
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 15:53:15 -0400
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From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> You would still however get the advantage that you wouldn't have to copy the
> data from the disk buffers to user space, you simply get the disk buffer
> mapped into your address space.

AFAICS this would be the *only* advantage.  While it's not negligible,
it's quite unclear that it's worth the bookkeeping and portability
headaches of managing lots of mmap'd areas, either.

Before I take this idea seriously at all, I'd want to see a design that
addresses a couple of critical issues:

1. Postgres' shared buffers are *shared*, potentially across many
processes.  How will you deal with buffers for files that have been
mmap'd by only some of the processes?  (Maybe this means that the
whole concept of shared buffers goes away, and each process does its
own buffer management based on its own mmaps.  Not sure.  That would be
a pretty radical restructuring though, and would completely invalidate
our present approach to page-level locking.)

2. How do you deal with extending a file?  My system's mmap man page
says
     If the size of the mapped file changes after the call to mmap(), the
     effect of references to portions of the mapped region that correspond
     to added or removed portions of the file is unspecified.
This suggests that the only portable way to cope is to issue a separate
mmap for every disk page.  Will typical Unix systems perform well with
umpteen thousand small mmap requests?

3. How do you persuade the other backends to drop their mmaps of a table
you are deleting?

There are probably other gotchas, but without an understanding of how
to address these, I doubt it's worth looking further ...

			regards, tom lane

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