USENIX 2001 Paper
[USENIX '01 Tech Program Index]
Magazines and Vmem:
Extending the Slab Allocator to Many CPUs and Arbitrary Resources
Jeff Bonwick, Sun Microsystems
Jonathan Adams, California Institute of Technology
The slab allocator [Bonwick94] provides efficient object caching but has two significant limitations: its global locking doesn't scale to many CPUs, and the allocator can't manage resources other than kernel memory. To provide scalability we introduce a per-processor caching scheme called the magazine layer that provides linear scaling to any number of CPUs. To support more general resource allocation we introduce a new virtual memory allocator, vmem, which acts as a universal backing store for the slab allocator. Vmem is a complete general-purpose resource allocator in its own right, providing several important new services; it also appears to be the first resource allocator that can satisfy arbitrary-size allocations in constant time. Magazines and vmem have yielded performance gains exceeding 50% on system-level benchmarks like LADDIS and SPECweb99.
We ported these technologies from kernel to user context and found that the resulting libumem outperforms the current best-of-breed user-level memory allocators. libumem also provides a richer programming model and can be used to manage other user-level resources.
The slab allocator [Bonwick94] has taken on a life of its own since its introduction in these pages seven years ago. Initially deployed in Solaris 2.4, it has since been adopted in whole or in part by several other operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, EROS, and Nemesis. It has also been adapted to applications such as BIRD and Perl. Slab allocation is now described in several OS textbooks [Bovet00, Mauro00, Vahalia96] and is part of the curriculum at major universities worldwide.
Meanwhile, the Solaris slab allocator has continued to evolve. It now provides per-CPU memory allocation, more general resource allocation, and is available as a user-level library. We describe these developments in seven sections as follows:
§2. Slab Allocator Review.
We begin with brief review of the original slab allocator.
§3. Magazines: Per-CPU Memory Allocation.
As servers with many CPUs became more common and memory latencies
continued to grow relative to processor speed, the slab allocator's
original locking strategy became a performance bottleneck. We
addressed this by introducing a per-CPU caching scheme called the
§4. Vmem: Fast, General Resource Allocation.
The slab allocator caches relatively small objects and relies on a more
general-purpose backing store to provide slabs and satisfy large
allocations. We describe a new resource allocator, vmem,
that can manage arbitrary sets of integers - anything from virtual memory
addresses to minor device numbers to process IDs. Vmem acts as a universal
backing store for the slab allocator, and provides powerful new
interfaces to address more complex resource allocation problems.
Vmem appears to be the first resource allocator that can satisfy
allocations and frees of any size in guaranteed constant time.
§5. Vmem-Related Slab Allocator Improvements.
We describe two key improvements to the slab allocator itself: it now
provides object caching for any vmem arena, and can issue
reclaim callbacks to notify clients when the arena's resources
are running low.
§6. libumem: A User-Level Slab Allocator.
We describe what was necessary to transplant the slab allocator from
kernel to user context, and show that the resulting libumem
outperforms even the current best-of-breed multithreaded user-level
We conclude with some observations about how these technologies have influenced
Solaris development in general.
2. Slab Allocator Review
2.1. Object Caches
Programs often cache their frequently used objects to improve performance. If a program frequently allocates and frees foo structures, it is likely to employ highly optimized foo_alloc() and foo_free() routines to avoid the overhead of malloc. The usual strategy is to cache foo objects on a simple freelist so that most allocations and frees take just a handful of instructions. Further optimization is possible if foo objects naturally return to a partially initialized state before they're freed, in which case foo_alloc() can assume that an object on the freelist is already partially initialized.
We refer to the techniques described above as object caching. Traditional malloc implementations cannot provide object caching because the malloc/free interface is typeless, so the slab allocator introduced an explicit object cache programming model with interfaces to create and destroy object caches, and allocate and free objects from them (see Figure 2.1).
The allocator and its clients cooperate to maintain an object's partially initialized, or constructed, state. The allocator guarantees that an object will be in this state when allocated; the client guarantees that it will be in this state when freed. Thus, we can allocate and free an object many times without destroying and reinitializing its locks, condition variables, reference counts, and other invariant state each time.
A slab is one or more pages of virtually contiguous memory, carved up into equal-size chunks, with a reference count indicating how many of those chunks are currently allocated. To create new objects the allocator creates a slab, applies the constructor to each chunk, and adds the resulting objects to the cache. If system memory runs low the allocator can reclaim any slabs whose reference count is zero by applying the destructor to each object and returning memory to the VM system. Once a cache is populated, allocations and frees are very fast: they just move an object to or from a freelist and update its slab reference count.
Figure 2.1: Slab Allocator Interface Summary
Creates a cache of objects, each of size size, aligned on an align boundary. name identifies the cache for statistics and debugging. constructor and destructor convert plain memory into objects and back again; constructor may fail if it needs to allocate memory but can't. reclaim is a callback issued by the allocator when system-wide resources are running low (see §5.2). private is a parameter passed to the constructor, destructor and reclaim callbacks to support parameterized caches (e.g. a separate packet cache for each instance of a SCSI HBA driver). vmp is the vmem source that provides memory to create slabs (see §4 and §5.1). cflags indicates special cache properties. kmem_cache_create() returns an opaque pointer to the object cache (a.k.a. kmem cache).
void kmem_cache_destroy(kmem_cache_t *cp);
Destroys the cache and releases all associated resources. All allocated objects must have been freed.
void *kmem_cache_alloc(kmem_cache_t *cp, int kmflag);
Gets an object from the cache. The object will be in its constructed state. kmflag is either KM_SLEEP or KM_NOSLEEP, indicating whether it's acceptable to wait for memory if none is currently available.
void kmem_cache_free(kmem_cache_t *cp, void *obj);
Returns an object to the cache. The object must be in its constructed state.
Uresh Vahalia, UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers
The biggest limitation of the original slab allocator is that it lacks multiprocessor scalability. To allocate an object the allocator must acquire the lock that protects the cache's slab list, thus serializing all allocations. To allow all CPUs to allocate in parallel we need some form of per-CPU caching.
Our basic approach is to give each CPU an M-element cache of objects called a magazine, by analogy with automatic weapons. Each CPU's magazine can satisfy M allocations before the CPU needs to reload that is, exchange its empty magazine for a full one. The CPU doesn't access any global data when allocating from its magazine, so we can increase scalability arbitrarily by increasing the magazine size (M).
In this section we describe how the magazine layer works and how it performs in practice. Figure 3 (below) illustrates the key concepts.
Figure 3: Structure of an Object Cache - The Magazine and Slab Layers
A magazine is an M-element array of pointers to objects1 with a count of the number of rounds (valid pointers) currently in the array. Conceptually, a magazine works like a stack. To allocate an object from a magazine we pop its top element:
To free an object to a magazine we push it on top:
We use magazines to provide each object cache with a small per-CPU object supply. Each CPU has its own loaded magazine, so transactions (allocations and frees) can proceed in parallel on all CPUs.
The interesting question is what to do if the loaded magazine is empty when we want to allocate an object (or full when we want to free one). We cannot just fall through to the slab layer, because then a long run of allocations would miss in the CPU layer every time, ruining scalability. Each object cache therefore keeps a global stockpile of magazines, the depot, to replenish its CPU layer. We refer to the CPU and depot layers collectively as the magazine layer.
With M-round magazines we would intuitively expect the CPU layer's miss rate to be at most 1/M, but in fact a tight loop of two allocations followed by two frees can cause thrashing, with half of all transactions accessing the globally-locked depot regardless of M, as shown in Figure 3.1a below.
We address this by keeping the previously loaded magazine in the CPU layer, as shown in Figure 3 (previous page). If the loaded magazine cannot satisfy a transaction but the previous magazine can, we exchange loaded with previous and try again. If neither magazine can satisfy the transaction, we return previous to the depot, move loaded to previous, and load a new magazine from the depot.
The key observation is that the only reason to load a new magazine is to replace a full with an empty or vice versa, so we know that after each reload the CPU either has a full loaded magazine and an empty previous magazine or vice versa. The CPU can therefore satisfy at least M allocations and at least M frees entirely with CPU-local magazines before it must access the depot again, so the CPU layer's worst-case miss rate is bounded by 1/M regardless of workload.
In the common case of short-lived objects with a high allocation rate there are two performance advantages to this scheme. First, balanced alloc/free pairs on the same CPU can almost all be satisfied by the loaded magazine; therefore we can expect the actual miss rate to be even lower than 1/M. Second, the LIFO nature of magazines implies that we tend to reuse the same objects over and over again. This is advantageous in hardware because the CPU will already own the cache lines for recently modified memory.
Figure 3.1b (next page) summarizes the overall magazine algorithm in pseudo-code. Figure 3.1c shows the actual code for the hot path (i.e. hitting in the loaded magazine) to illustrate how little work is required.
Figure 3.1b: The Magazine Algorithm
3.2. Object Construction
The original slab allocator applied constructors at slab creation time. This can be wasteful for objects whose constructors allocate additional memory. To take an extreme example, suppose an 8-byte object's constructor attaches a 1K buffer to it. Assuming 8K pages, one slab would contain about 1000 objects, which after construction would consume 1MB of memory. If only a few of these objects were ever allocated, most of that 1MB would be wasted.
We addressed this by moving object construction up to the magazine layer and keeping only raw buffers in the slab layer. Now a buffer becomes an object (has its constructor applied) when it moves from the slab layer up to the magazine layer, and an object becomes a raw buffer (has its destructor applied) when it moves from the magazine layer back down to the slab layer.
3.3. Populating the Magazine Layer
We have described how the magazine layer works once it's populated, but how does it get populated?
There are two distinct problems here: we must allocate objects, and we must allocate magazines to hold them.
We never allocate full magazines explicitly, because it's not necessary: empty magazines are eventually filled by frees, so it suffices to create empty magazines and let full ones emerge as a side effect of normal allocation/free traffic.
We allocate the magazines themselves (i.e. the arrays of pointers) from object caches, just like everything else; there is no need for a special magazine allocator.2
3.4. Dynamic Magazine Resizing
Thus far we have discussed M-element magazines without specifying how M is determined. We've observed that we can make the CPU layer's miss rate as low as we like by increasing M, but making M larger than necessary would waste memory. We therefore seek the smallest value of M that delivers linear scalability.
Rather than picking some magic value, we designed the magazine layer to tune itself dynamically. We start each object cache with a small value of M and observe the contention rate on the depot lock. We do this by using a non-blocking trylock primitive on the depot lock; if that fails we use the ordinary blocking lock primitive and increment a contention count. If the contention rate exceeds a fixed threshold we increase the cache's magazine size. We enforce a maximum magazine size to ensure that this feedback loop can't get out of control, but in practice the algorithm behaves extremely well on everything from desktops to 64-CPU Starfires. The algorithm generally stabilizes after several minutes of load with reasonable magazine sizes and depot lock contention rates of less than once per second.
3.5. Protecting Per-CPU State
An object cache's CPU layer contains per-CPU state that must be protected either by per-CPU locking or by disabling interrupts. We selected per-CPU locking for several reasons:
3.6. Hardware Cache Effects
Even per-CPU algorithms don't scale if they suffer from false sharing (contention for ownership of a cache line that can occur when multiple CPUs modify logically unrelated data that happens to reside in the same physical cache line). We carefully pad and align the magazine layer's per-CPU data structures so that each one has its own cache line. We found that doing so is critical for linear scalability on modern hardware.
An allocator can also induce false sharing by handing out objects smaller than a cache line to more than one CPU [Berger00]. We haven't found this to be a problem in practice, however, because most kernel data structures are larger than a cache line.
3.7. Using the Depot as a Working Set
When the system is in steady state, allocations and frees must be roughly in balance (because memory usage is roughly constant). The variation in memory consumption over a fixed period of time defines a form of working set [Denning68]; specifically, it defines how many magazines the depot must have on hand to keep the allocator working mostly out of its high-performance magazine layer. For example, if the depot's full magazine list varies between 37 and 47 magazines over a given period, then the working set is 10 magazines; the other 37 are eligible for reclaiming.
The depot continuously tracks the working set sizes of its full and empty magazine lists, but does not actually free excess magazines unless memory runs low.
The two key metrics for an MT-hot memory allocator are latency and scalability. We measured latency as the average time per iteration of a tight alloc/free loop. We measured scalability by running multiple instances of the latency test on a 333MHz 16-CPU Starfire.
The latency test revealed that the magazine layer improves even single-CPU performance (356ns per alloc/free pair vs. 743ns for the original slab allocator) because the hot path is so simple (see Figure 3.1c). Indeed, there is little room for further improvement in latency because the cost of locking imposes a lower bound of 186ns.
As we increased the number of threads the magazine layer exhibited perfect linear scaling, as shown below. Without the magazine layer, throughput was actually lower with additional threads due to increasingly pathological lock contention. With 16 threads (all 16 CPUs busy) the magazine layer delivered 16 times higher throughput than a single CPU (and 340 times higher throughput than the original allocator), with the same 356ns latency.
We ran several system-level benchmarks both with and without the magazine layer to assess the magazine layer's effectiveness.3 The system was uniformly faster with magazines, with the greatest improvements in allocator-intensive workloads like network I/O.
We ran the industry-standard SPECweb99 web server benchmark [SPEC01] on an 8-CPU E4500. The magazine layer more than doubled performance, from 995 to 2037 simultaneous connections. The gain is so dramatic because every network packet comes from the allocator.
We ran the industry-standard TPC-C database benchmark [TPC01] on an 8-CPU E6000. Magazines improved performance by 7%. The gain here is much more modest than with SPECweb99 because TPC-C is not very demanding of the kernel memory allocator.
We ran Kenbus, a precursor to the SPEC SMT (System Multi-Tasking) benchmark currently under development [SPEC01], on a 24-CPU E6000. The magazine layer improved peak throughput by 13% and improved the system's ability to sustain peak throughput as load increased. At maximum tested load (6000 users) the magazine layer improved system throughput by 23%.
The magazine layer provides efficient object caching with very low latency and linear scaling to any number of CPUs. We discussed the magazine layer in the context of the slab allocator, but in fact the algorithms are completely general. A magazine layer can be added to any memory allocator to make it scale.
The slab allocator relies on two lower-level system services to create slabs: a virtual address allocator to provide kernel virtual addresses, and VM routines to back those addresses with physical pages and establish virtual-to-physical translations.
Incredibly, we found that our largest systems were scalability-limited by the old virtual address allocator. It tended to fragment the address space badly over time, its latency was linear in the number of fragments, and the whole thing was single-threaded.
Virtual address allocation is just one example of the more general problem of resource allocation. For our purposes, a resource is anything that can be described by a set of integers. For example, virtual addresses are subsets of the 64-bit integers; process IDs are subsets of the integers [0, 30000]; and minor device numbers are subsets of the 32-bit integers.
Resource allocation (in the sense described above) is a fundamental problem that every operating system must solve, yet it is surprisingly absent in the literature. It appears that 40 years of research on memory allocators has simply never been applied to resource allocators. The resource allocators for Linux, all the BSD kernels, and Solaris 7 or earlier all use linear-time algorithms.
In this section we describe a new general-purpose resource allocator, vmem, which provides guaranteed constant-time performance with low fragmentation. Vmem appears to be the first resource allocator that can do this.
We begin by providing background on the current state of the art. We then lay out our objectives in creating vmem, describe the vmem interfaces, explain the implementation in detail, and discuss vmem's performance (fragmentation, latency, and scalability) under both benchmarks and real-world conditions.
Almost all versions of Unix have a resource map allocator called rmalloc() [Vahalia96]. A resource map can be any set of integers, though it's most often an address range like [0xe0000000, 0xf0000000). The interface is simple: rmalloc(map, size) allocates a segment of the specified size from map, and rmfree(map, size, addr) gives it back.
Linux's resource allocator and BSD's extent allocator provide roughly the same services. All three suffer from serious flaws in both design and implementation:
We believe a good resource allocator should have the following properties:
The vmem interfaces do three basic things: create and destroy arenas to describe resources, allocate and free resources, and allow arenas to import new resources dynamically. This section describes the key concepts and the rationale behind them. Figure 4.3 (next page) provides the complete vmem interface specification.
4.3.1. Creating Arenas
The first thing we need is the ability to define a resource collection, or arena. An arena is simply a set of integers. Vmem arenas most often represent virtual memory addresses (hence the name vmem), but in fact they can represent any integer resource, from virtual addresses to minor device numbers to process IDs.
The integers in an arena can usually be described as a single contiguous range, or span, such as [100, 500), so we specify this initial span to vmem_create(). For discontiguous resources we can use vmem_add() to piece the arena together one span at a time.
4.3.2. Allocating and Freeing Resources
The primary interfaces to allocate and free resources are simple: vmem_alloc(vmp, size, vmflag) allocates a segment of size bytes from arena vmp, and vmem_free(vmp, addr, size) gives it back.
We also provide a vmem_xalloc() interface that can specify common allocation constraints: alignment, phase (offset from the alignment), address range, and boundary-crossing restrictions (e.g. don't cross a page boundary). vmem_xalloc() is useful for things like kernel DMA code, which allocates kernel virtual addresses using the phase and alignment constraints to ensure correct cache coloring.
Each vmem_[x]alloc() can specify one of three allocation policies through its vmflag argument:
We also offer an arena-wide allocation policy called quantum caching. The idea is that most allocations are for just a few quanta (e.g. one or two pages of heap or one minor device number), so we employ high-performance caching for each multiple of the quantum up to qcache_max, specified in vmem_create(). We make the caching threshold explicit so that each arena can request the amount of caching appropriate for the resource it manages. Quantum caches provide perfect-fit, very low latency, and linear scalability for the most common allocation sizes (§4.4.4).
4.3.3. Importing From Another Arena
Vmem allows one arena to import its resources from another. vmem_create() specifies the source arena, and the functions to allocate and free from that source. The arena imports new spans as needed, and gives them back when all their segments have been freed.
The power of importing lies in the side effects of the import functions, and is best understood by example. In Solaris, the function segkmem_alloc() invokes vmem_alloc() to get a virtual address and then backs it with physical pages. Therefore, we can create an arena of mapped pages by simply importing from an arena of virtual addresses using segkmem_alloc() and segkmem_free(). Appendix A illustrates how vmem's import mechanism can be used to create complex resources from simple building blocks.
Creates a vmem arena called name whose initial span is [base, base + size). The arena's natural unit of currency is quantum, so vmem_alloc() guarantees quantum-aligned results. The arena may import new spans by invoking afunc on source, and may return those spans by invoking ffunc on source. Small allocations are common, so the arena provides high-performance caching for each integer multiple of quantum up to qcache_max. vmflag is either VM_SLEEP or VM_NOSLEEP depending on whether the caller is willing to wait for memory to create the arena. vmem_create() returns an opaque pointer to the arena.
void vmem_destroy(vmem_t *vmp);
Destroys arena vmp.
void *vmem_alloc(vmem_t *vmp, size_t size, int vmflag);
Allocates size bytes from vmp. Returns the allocated address on success, NULL on failure. vmem_alloc() fails only if vmflag specifies VM_NOSLEEP and no resources are currently available. vmflag may also specify an allocation policy (VM_BESTFIT, VM_INSTANTFIT, or VM_NEXTFIT) as described in §4.3.2. If no policy is specified the default is VM_INSTANTFIT, which provides a good approximation to best-fit in guaranteed constant time.
void vmem_free(vmem_t *vmp, void *addr, size_t size);
Frees size bytes at addr to arena vmp.
Allocates size bytes at offset phase from an align boundary such that the resulting segment [addr, addr + size) is a subset of [minaddr, maxaddr) that does not straddle a nocross-aligned boundary. vmflag is as above. One performance caveat: if either minaddr or maxaddr is non-NULL, vmem may not be able to satisfy the allocation in constant time. If allocations within a given [minaddr, maxaddr) range are common it is more efficient to declare that range to be its own arena and use unconstrained allocations on the new arena.
void vmem_xfree(vmem_t *vmp, void *addr, size_t size);
Frees size bytes at addr, where addr was a constrained allocation. vmem_xfree() must be used if the original allocation was a vmem_xalloc() because both routines bypass the quantum caches.
void *vmem_add(vmem_t *vmp, void *addr, size_t size, int vmflag);
Adds the span [addr, addr + size) to arena vmp. Returns addr on success, NULL on failure. vmem_add() will fail only if vmflag is VM_NOSLEEP and no resources are currently available.
vmem_alloc() vectors allocations based on size: small allocations go to the quantum caches, larger ones to the segment list. In this figure we've depicted an arena with a 1-page quantum and a 5-page qcache_max. Note that the segment list is, strictly speaking, a list of boundary tags (BT below) that represent the segments. Boundary tags for allocated segments (white) are also linked into an allocated-segment hash table, and boundary tags for free segments (gray) are linked into size-segregated freelists (not shown).
4.4.1. Keeping Track of Segments
Apparently, too few researchers realized the full significance of Knuth's invention of boundary tags.
Paul R. Wilson et. al. in [Wilson95]
Most implementations of malloc() prepend a small amount of space to each buffer to hold information for the allocator. These boundary tags, invented by Knuth in 1962 [Knuth73], solve two major problems:
Unfortunately, resource allocators can't use traditional boundary tags because the resource they're managing may not be memory (and therefore may not be able to hold information). In vmem we address this by using external boundary tags. For each segment in the arena we allocate a boundary tag to manage it, as shown in Figure 4.4 below. (See Appendix A for a description of how we allocate the boundary tags themselves.) We'll see shortly that external boundary tags enable constant-time performance.
4.4.2. Allocating and Freeing Segments
Each arena has a segment list that links all of its segments in address order, as shown in Figure 4.4. Every segment also belongs to either a freelist or an allocation hash chain, as described below. (The arena's segment list also includes span markers to keep track of span boundaries, so we can easily tell when an imported span can be returned to its source.)
We keep all free segments on power-of-two freelists; that is, freelist[n] contains all free segments whose sizes are in the range [2n, 2n+1). To allocate a segment we search the appropriate freelist for a segment large enough to satisfy the allocation. This approach, called segregated fit, actually approximates best-fit because any segment on the chosen freelist is a good fit [Wilson95]. (Indeed, with power-of-two freelists, a segregated fit is necessarily within 2x of a perfect fit.) Approximations to best-fit are appealing because they exhibit low fragmentation in practice for a wide variety of workloads [Johnstone97].
Once we've selected a segment, we remove it from its freelist. If the segment is not an exact fit we split the segment, create a boundary tag for the remainder, and put the remainder on the appropriate freelist. We then add our newly-allocated segment's boundary tag to a hash table so vmem_free() can find it quickly.
vmem_free() is straightforward: it looks up the segment's boundary tag in the allocated-segment hash table, removes it from the hash table, tries to coalesce the segment with its neighbors, and puts it on the appropriate freelist. All operations are constant-time. Note that the hash lookup also provides a cheap and effective sanity check: the freed address must be in the hash table, and the freed size must match the segment size. This helps to catch bugs such as duplicate frees.
The key feature of the algorithm described above is that its performance is independent of both transaction size and arena fragmentation. Vmem appears to be the first resource allocator that can perform allocations and frees of any size in guaranteed constant time.
4.4.3. Locking Strategy
For simplicity, we protect each arena's segment list, freelists, and hash table with a global lock. We rely on the fact that large allocations are relatively rare, and allow the arena's quantum caches to provide linear scalability for all the common allocation sizes. This strategy is very effective in practice, as illustrated by the performance data in §4.5 and the allocation statistics for a large Solaris 8 server in Appendix B.
The slab allocator can provide object caching for any vmem arena (§5.1), so vmem's quantum caches are actually implemented as object caches. For each small integer multiple of the arena's quantum we create an object cache to service requests of that size. vmem_alloc() and vmem_free() simply convert each small request (size <= qcache_max) into a kmem_cache_alloc() or kmem_cache_free() on the appropriate cache, as illustrated in Figure 4.4. Because it is based on object caching, quantum caching provides very low latency and linear scalability for the most common allocation sizes.
When we create an arena's quantum caches we pass a flag to kmem_cache_create(), KMC_QCACHE, that directs the slab allocator to use a particular slab size: the next power of two above 3 * qcache_max. We use this particular value for three reasons: (1) the slab size must be larger than qcache_max to prevent infinite recursion; (2) by numerical luck, this slab size provides near-perfect slab packing (e.g. five 3-page objects fill 15/16 of a 16-page slab); and (3) we'll see below that using a common slab size for all quantum caches helps to reduce overall arena fragmentation.
A waste is a terrible thing to mind. - Anonymous
Fragmentation is the disintegration of a resource into unusably small, discontiguous segments. To see how this can happen, imagine allocating a 1GB resource one byte at a time, then freeing only the even-numbered bytes. The arena would then have 500MB free, yet it could not even satisfy a 2-byte allocation.
We observe that it is the combination of different allocation sizes and different segment lifetimes that causes persistent fragmentation. If all allocations are the same size, then any freed segment can obviously satisfy another allocation of the same size. If all allocations are transient, the fragmentation is transient.
We have no control over segment lifetime, but quantum caching offers some control over allocation size: namely, all quantum caches have the same slab size, so most allocations from the arena's segment list occur in slab-size chunks.
At first it may appear that all we've done is move the problem: the segment list won't fragment as much, but now the quantum caches themselves can suffer fragmentation in the form of partially-used slabs. The critical difference is that the free objects in a quantum cache are of a size that's known to be useful, whereas the segment list can disintegrate into useless pieces under hostile workloads. Moreover, prior allocation is a good predictor of future allocation [Weinstock88], so free objects are likely to be used again.
It is impossible to prove that this helps,5 but it seems to work well in practice. We have never had a report of severe fragmentation since vmem's introduction (we had many such reports with the old resource map allocator), and Solaris systems often stay up for years.
4.5.1. Microbenchmark Performance
We've stated that vmem_alloc() and vmem_free() are constant-time operations regardless of arena fragmentation, whereas rmalloc() and rmfree() are linear-time. We measured alloc/free latency as a function of fragmentation to verify this.
rmalloc() has a slight performance edge at very low fragmentation because the algorithm is so naïve. At zero fragmentation, vmem's latency without quantum caching was 1560ns, vs. 715ns for rmalloc(). Quantum caching reduces vmem's latency to just 482ns, so for allocations that go to the quantum caches (the common case) vmem is faster than rmalloc() even at very low fragmentation.
Vmem's low latency and linear scaling remedied serious pathologies in the performance of kernel virtual address allocation under rmalloc(), yielding dramatic improvements in system-level performance.
The vmem interface supports both simple and highly constrained allocations, and its importing mechanism can build complex resources from simple components. The interface is sufficiently general that we've been able to eliminate over 30 special-purpose allocators in Solaris since vmem's introduction.
The vmem implementation has proven to be very fast and scalable, improving performance on system-level benchmarks by 50% or more. It has also proven to be very robust against fragmentation in practice.
Vmem's instant-fit policy and external boundary tags appear to be new concepts. They guarantee constant-time performance regardless of allocation size or arena fragmentation.
Vmem's quantum caches provide very low latency and linear scalability for the most common allocations. They also present a particularly friendly workload to the arena's segment list, which helps to reduce overall arena fragmentation.
Sections 3 and 4 described the magazine and vmem layers, two new technologies above and below the slab layer. In this section we describe two vmem-related enhancements to the slab allocator itself.
5.1. Object Caching for Any Resource
The original slab allocator used rmalloc() to get kernel heap addresses for its slabs and invoked the VM system to back those addresses with physical pages.
Every object cache now uses a vmem arena as its slab supplier. The slab allocator simply invokes vmem_alloc() and vmem_free() to create and destroy slabs. It makes no assumptions about the nature of the resource it's managing, so it can provide object caching for any arena.6 This feature is what makes vmem's high-performance quantum caching possible (§4.4.4).
5.2. Reclaim Callbacks
For performance, the kernel caches things that aren't strictly needed. The DNLC (directory name lookup cache) improves pathname resolution performance, for example, but most DNLC entries aren't actually in use at any given moment. If the DNLC could be notified when the system was running low on memory, it could free some of its entries to relieve memory pressure.
We support this by allowing clients to specify a reclaim callback to kmem_cache_create(). The allocator calls this function when the cache's vmem arena is running low on resources. The callback is purely advisory; what it actually does is entirely up to the client. A typical action might be to give back some fraction of the objects, or to free all objects that haven't been accessed in the last N seconds.
This capability allows clients like the DNLC, inode cache and NFS_READDIR cache to grow more or less unrestricted until the system runs low on memory, at which point they are asked to start giving some back.
One possible future enhancement would be to add an argument to the reclaim callback to indicate the number of bytes wanted, or the level of desperation. We have not yet done so because simple callback policies like give back 10% each time I'm called have proven to be perfectly adequate in practice.
It was relatively straightforward to transplant the magazine, slab, and vmem technologies to user-level. We created a library, libumem, that provides all the same services. In this section we discuss the handful of porting issues that came up and compare libumem's performance to other user-level memory allocators. libumem is still experimental as of this writing.
6.1. Porting Issues
The allocation code (magazine, slab, and vmem) was essentially unchanged; the challenge was to find user-level replacements for the kernel functionality on which it relies, and to accommodate the limitations and interface requirements of user-level library code.
Note: the shaded area indicates data points where the number of threads exceeds the number of CPUs; all curves necessarily flatten at that point. An allocator with linear scaling should be linear up to the shaded area, then flat.
A complete analysis of user-level memory allocators is beyond the scope of this paper, so we compared libumem only to the strongest competition:
During our measurements we found several serious scalability problems with the Solaris mtmalloc library. mtmalloc creates per-CPU power-of-two freelists for sizes up to 64K, but its algorithm for selecting a freelist was simply round-robin; thus its workload was merely fanned out, not made CPU-local. Moreover, the round-robin index was itself a global variable, so frequent increments by all CPUs caused severe contention for its cache line. We also found that mtmalloc's per-CPU data structures were not suitably padded and aligned to cache line boundaries to prevent false sharing, as discussed in §3.6.
We fixed mtmalloc to select a per-CPU freelist by thread ID hashing as in libumem, and we padded and aligned its per-CPU data structures. These changes improved the scalability of mtmalloc dramatically, making it competitive with Hoard and libumem.
We measured the allocators' scalability on a 10-CPU E4000 using the methods described in §3.8. Figure 6.2 shows that libc's malloc and the original mtmalloc perform abysmally as the number of threads increases. ptmalloc provides good scalability up to 8 CPUs, but appears not to scale beyond that. By contrast, libumem, Hoard, and the fixed mtmalloc all show linear scaling. Only the slopes differ, with libumem being the fastest.
The enduring lesson from our experience with the slab allocator is that it is essential to create excellent core services. It may seem strange at first, but core services are often the most neglected.
People working on a particular performance problem such as web server performance typically focus on a specific goal like better SPECweb99 numbers. If profiling data suggests that a core system service is one of the top five problems, our hypothetical SPECweb99 performance team is more likely to find a quick-and-dirty way to avoid that service than to embark on a major detour from their primary task and redesign the offending subsystem. This is how we ended up with over 30 special-purpose allocators before the advent of vmem.
Such quick-and-dirty solutions, while adequate at the time, do not advance operating system technology. Quite the opposite: they make the system more complex, less maintainable, and leave behind a mess of ticking time bombs that will eventually have to be dealt with. None of our 30 special-purpose allocators, for example, had anything like a magazine layer; thus every one of them was a scalability problem in waiting. (In fact, some were no longer waiting.)
Before 1994, Solaris kernel engineers avoided the memory allocator because it was known to be slow. Now, by contrast, our engineers actively seek ways to use the allocator because it is known to be fast and scalable. They also know that the allocator provides extensive statistics and debugging support, which makes whatever they're doing that much easier.
We currently use the allocator to manage ordinary kernel memory, virtual memory, DMA, minor device numbers, System V semaphores, thread stacks and task IDs. More creative uses are currently in the works, including using the allocator to manage pools of worker threads - the idea being that the depot working set provides an effective algorithm to manage the size of the thread pool. And in the near future, libumem will bring all of this technology to user-level applications and libraries.
We've demonstrated that magazines and vmem have improved performance on real-world system-level benchmarks by 50% or more. But equally important, we achieved these gains by investing in a core system service (resource allocation) that many other project teams have built on. Investing in core services is critical to maintaining and evolving a fast, reliable operating system.
We would like to thank:
Magazines and vmem are part of Solaris 8. The source is available for free download at http://www.sun.com.
For general background, [Wilson95] provides an extensive survey of memory allocation techniques. In addition, the references in [Berger00], [Bonwick94], and [Wilson95] list dozens of excellent papers on memory allocation.
[Berger00] Emery D. Berger, Kathryn S. McKinley, Robert D. Blumofe, Paul R. Wilson. Hoard: A Scalable Memory Allocator for Multithreaded Applications. ASPLOS-IX, Cambridge, MA, November 2000. Available at http://www.hoard.org.
[BIRD01] BIRD Programmer's Documentation. Available at http://bird.network.cz.
[Bonwick94] Jeff Bonwick. The Slab Allocator: An Object-Caching Kernel Memory Allocator. Summer 1994 Usenix Conference, pp. 87-98. Available at http://www.usenix.org.
[Bovet00] Daniel P. Bovet and Marco Cesati. Understanding the Linux Kernel. Prentice Hall, 2000.
[Denning68] Peter J. Denning. The Working Set Model for Program Behaviour. CACM 11(5), 1968, pp. 323-333.
[FreeBSD01] The FreeBSD source code. Available at http://www.freebsd.org.
[Gloger01] Source code and documentation for ptmalloc are available on Wolfram Gloger's home page at http://www.malloc.de.
[Johnstone97] Mark S. Johnstone and Paul R. Wilson. The Memory Fragmentation Problem: Solved? ISMM'98 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management, pp. 26-36. Available at ftp://ftp.dcs.gla.ac.uk/pub/drastic/gc/wilson.ps.
[Khanna92] Sandeep Khanna, Michael Sebree and John Zolnowski. Realtime Scheduling in SunOS 5.0. Winter 1992 USENIX Conference.
[Knuth73] Donald Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming: Fundamental Algorithms. Addison Wesley, 1973.
[Linux01] The Linux source code. Available at http://www.linux.org.
[Mauro00] Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall. Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture. Prentice Hall, 2000.
[McKenney93] Paul E. McKenney and Jack Slingwine. Efficient Kernel Memory Allocation on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors. Proceedings of the Winter 1993 Usenix Conference, pp. 295-305. Available at http://www.usenix.org.
[Nemesis01] The Nemesis source code. Available at http://nemesis.sourceforge.net.
[NetBSD01] The NetBSD source code. Available at http://www.netbsd.org.
[OpenBSD01] The OpenBSD source code. Available at http://www.openbsd.org.
[Perl01] The Perl source code. Available at http://www.perl.org.
[Shapiro01] Jonathan Shapiro, personal communi-cation. Information on the EROS operating system is available at http://www.eros-os.org.
[Sleator85] D. D. Sleator and R. E. Tarjan. Self-Adjusting Binary Trees. JACM 1985.
[SPEC01] Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Available at http://www.spec.org.
[Swain98] Peter Swain, Softway. Personal communication.
[Taylor99] Randy Taylor, Veritas Software. Personal communication.
[TPC01] Transaction Processing Council. Available at http://www.tpc.org.
[Vahalia96] Uresh Vahalia. UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers. Prentice Hall, 1996.
[Weinstock88] Charles B. Weinstock and William A. Wulf. QuickFit: An Efficient Algorithm for Heap Storage Allocation. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.23, no. 10, pp. 141-144 (1988).
[Wilson95] Paul R. Wilson, Mark S. Johnstone, Michael Neely, David Boles. Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Memory Management, September 1995. Available at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/wilson95dynamic.html.
Jeff Bonwick (email@example.com) is a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He works primarily on core kernel services (allocators, lock primitives, timing, filesystems, VM, scalability) and has created several system observability tools such as kstat(3K), mpstat(1M) and lockstat(1M). He is currently leading the design and implementation of a new storage architecture for Solaris.
Jonathan Adams (firstname.lastname@example.org) is a senior at the California Institute of Technology. He developed libumem during his summer internship at Sun.
In this Appendix we describe all the key steps to get from system boot to creating a complex object cache.
At compile time we statically declare a few vmem arena structures and boundary tags to get us through boot. During boot, the first arena we create is the primordial heap_arena, which defines the kernel virtual address range to use for the kernel heap:
vmem_create(), seeing that we're early in boot, uses one of the statically declared arenas to represent the heap, and uses statically declared boundary tags to represent the heap's initial span. Once we have the heap arena, we can create new boundary tags dynamically. For simplicity, we always allocate a whole page of boundary tags at a time: we select a page of heap, map it, divvy it up into boundary tags, use one of those boundary tags to represent the heap page we just allocated, and put the rest on the arena's free boundary tag list.
Next, we create kmem_va_arena as a subset of heap_arena to provide virtual address caching (via quantum caching) for up to 8 pages. Quantum caching improves performance and helps to minimize heap fragmentation, as we saw in §4.4.5. kmem_va_arena uses vmem_alloc() and vmem_free() to import from heap_arena:
Finally, we create kmem_default_arena, the backing store for most object caches. Its import function, segkmem_alloc(), invokes vmem_alloc() to get virtual addresses and then backs them with physical pages:
At this point we have a simple page-level allocator: to get three pages of mapped kernel heap, we could call vmem_alloc(kmem_default_arena, 3 * PAGESIZE, VM_SLEEP) directly. In fact, this is precisely how the slab allocator gets memory for new slabs. Finally, the kernel's various subsystems create their object caches. For example, the UFS filesystem creates its inode cache:
The data on this page was obtained by running the
on a large Solaris 8 server. It was substantially trimmed to fit the page.
1We use an array of object pointers, rather than just linking objects together on a freelist, for two reasons: first, freelist linkage would overwrite an object's constructed state; and second, we plan to use the slab allocator to manage arbitrary resources, so we can't assume that the objects we're managing are backed by writable memory.
2Note that if we allocated full magazines in the allocation path, this would cause infinite recursion the first time we tried to allocate a magazine for one of the magazine caches. There is no such problem with allocating empty magazines in the free path.
3Unfortunately we could not make direct comparisons with other kernel memory allocators because the Solaris kernel makes extensive use of the object cache interfaces, which are simply not available in other allocators. We will, however, provide direct comparisons with best-of-breed user-level allocators in §6.
4We like instant-fit because it guarantees constant time performance, provides low fragmentation in practice, and is easy to implement. There are many other techniques for choosing a suitable free segment in reasonable (e.g. logarithmic) time, such as keeping all free segments in a size-sorted tree; see [Wilson95] for a thorough survey. Any of these techniques could be used for a vmem implementation.
5In fact, it has been proven that there is no reliable algorithm for ensuring efficient memory usage, and none is possible. [Wilson95]
6For caches backed by non-memory vmem arenas, the caller must specify the KMC_NOTOUCH flag to kmem_cache_create() so the allocator won't try to use free buffers to hold its internal state.
7Our game plan is to make the kernel and thread library cooperate, so that whenever the kernel dispatches a thread to a different CPU, it stores the new CPU ID in the user-level thread structure.
This paper was originally published in the
Proceedings of the 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June
25Ð30, 2001, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Last changed: 3 Jan. 2002 ml