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Andrea Arcangeli 71e3aac072 thp: transparent hugepage core Lately I've been working to make KVM use hugepages transparently without the usual restrictions of hugetlbfs. Some of the restrictions I'd like to see removed: 1) hugepages have to be swappable or the guest physical memory remains locked in RAM and can't be paged out to swap 2) if a hugepage allocation fails, regular pages should be allocated instead and mixed in the same vma without any failure and without userland noticing 3) if some task quits and more hugepages become available in the buddy, guest physical memory backed by regular pages should be relocated on hugepages automatically in regions under madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) (ideally event driven by waking up the kernel deamon if the order=HPAGE_PMD_SHIFT-PAGE_SHIFT list becomes not null) 4) avoidance of reservation and maximization of use of hugepages whenever possible. Reservation (needed to avoid runtime fatal faliures) may be ok for 1 machine with 1 database with 1 database cache with 1 database cache size known at boot time. It's definitely not feasible with a virtualization hypervisor usage like RHEV-H that runs an unknown number of virtual machines with an unknown size of each virtual machine with an unknown amount of pagecache that could be potentially useful in the host for guest not using O_DIRECT (aka cache=off). hugepages in the virtualization hypervisor (and also in the guest!) are much more important than in a regular host not using virtualization, becasue with NPT/EPT they decrease the tlb-miss cacheline accesses from 24 to 19 in case only the hypervisor uses transparent hugepages, and they decrease the tlb-miss cacheline accesses from 19 to 15 in case both the linux hypervisor and the linux guest both uses this patch (though the guest will limit the addition speedup to anonymous regions only for now...). Even more important is that the tlb miss handler is much slower on a NPT/EPT guest than for a regular shadow paging or no-virtualization scenario. So maximizing the amount of virtual memory cached by the TLB pays off significantly more with NPT/EPT than without (even if there would be no significant speedup in the tlb-miss runtime). The first (and more tedious) part of this work requires allowing the VM to handle anonymous hugepages mixed with regular pages transparently on regular anonymous vmas. This is what this patch tries to achieve in the least intrusive possible way. We want hugepages and hugetlb to be used in a way so that all applications can benefit without changes (as usual we leverage the KVM virtualization design: by improving the Linux VM at large, KVM gets the performance boost too). The most important design choice is: always fallback to 4k allocation if the hugepage allocation fails! This is the _very_ opposite of some large pagecache patches that failed with -EIO back then if a 64k (or similar) allocation failed... Second important decision (to reduce the impact of the feature on the existing pagetable handling code) is that at any time we can split an hugepage into 512 regular pages and it has to be done with an operation that can't fail. This way the reliability of the swapping isn't decreased (no need to allocate memory when we are short on memory to swap) and it's trivial to plug a split_huge_page* one-liner where needed without polluting the VM. Over time we can teach mprotect, mremap and friends to handle pmd_trans_huge natively without calling split_huge_page. The fact it can't fail isn't just for swap: if split_huge_page would return -ENOMEM (instead of the current void) we'd need to rollback the mprotect from the middle of it (ideally including undoing the split_vma) which would be a big change and in the very wrong direction (it'd likely be simpler not to call split_huge_page at all and to teach mprotect and friends to handle hugepages instead of rolling them back from the middle). In short the very value of split_huge_page is that it can't fail. The collapsing and madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) part will remain separated and incremental and it'll just be an "harmless" addition later if this initial part is agreed upon. It also should be noted that locking-wise replacing regular pages with hugepages is going to be very easy if compared to what I'm doing below in split_huge_page, as it will only happen when page_count(page) matches page_mapcount(page) if we can take the PG_lock and mmap_sem in write mode. collapse_huge_page will be a "best effort" that (unlike split_huge_page) can fail at the minimal sign of trouble and we can try again later. collapse_huge_page will be similar to how KSM works and the madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) will work similar to madvise(MADV_MERGEABLE). The default I like is that transparent hugepages are used at page fault time. This can be changed with /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled. The control knob can be set to three values "always", "madvise", "never" which mean respectively that hugepages are always used, or only inside madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) regions, or never used. /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag instead controls if the hugepage allocation should defrag memory aggressively "always", only inside "madvise" regions, or "never". The pmd_trans_splitting/pmd_trans_huge locking is very solid. The put_page (from get_user_page users that can't use mmu notifier like O_DIRECT) that runs against a __split_huge_page_refcount instead was a pain to serialize in a way that would result always in a coherent page count for both tail and head. I think my locking solution with a compound_lock taken only after the page_first is valid and is still a PageHead should be safe but it surely needs review from SMP race point of view. In short there is no current existing way to serialize the O_DIRECT final put_page against split_huge_page_refcount so I had to invent a new one (O_DIRECT loses knowledge on the mapping status by the time gup_fast returns so...). And I didn't want to impact all gup/gup_fast users for now, maybe if we change the gup interface substantially we can avoid this locking, I admit I didn't think too much about it because changing the gup unpinning interface would be invasive. If we ignored O_DIRECT we could stick to the existing compound refcounting code, by simply adding a get_user_pages_fast_flags(foll_flags) where KVM (and any other mmu notifier user) would call it without FOLL_GET (and if FOLL_GET isn't set we'd just BUG_ON if nobody registered itself in the current task mmu notifier list yet). But O_DIRECT is fundamental for decent performance of virtualized I/O on fast storage so we can't avoid it to solve the race of put_page against split_huge_page_refcount to achieve a complete hugepage feature for KVM. Swap and oom works fine (well just like with regular pages ;). MMU notifier is handled transparently too, with the exception of the young bit on the pmd, that didn't have a range check but I think KVM will be fine because the whole point of hugepages is that EPT/NPT will also use a huge pmd when they notice gup returns pages with PageCompound set, so they won't care of a range and there's just the pmd young bit to check in that case. NOTE: in some cases if the L2 cache is small, this may slowdown and waste memory during COWs because 4M of memory are accessed in a single fault instead of 8k (the payoff is that after COW the program can run faster). So we might want to switch the copy_huge_page (and clear_huge_page too) to not temporal stores. I also extensively researched ways to avoid this cache trashing with a full prefault logic that would cow in 8k/16k/32k/64k up to 1M (I can send those patches that fully implemented prefault) but I concluded they're not worth it and they add an huge additional complexity and they remove all tlb benefits until the full hugepage has been faulted in, to save a little bit of memory and some cache during app startup, but they still don't improve substantially the cache-trashing during startup if the prefault happens in >4k chunks. One reason is that those 4k pte entries copied are still mapped on a perfectly cache-colored hugepage, so the trashing is the worst one can generate in those copies (cow of 4k page copies aren't so well colored so they trashes less, but again this results in software running faster after the page fault). Those prefault patches allowed things like a pte where post-cow pages were local 4k regular anon pages and the not-yet-cowed pte entries were pointing in the middle of some hugepage mapped read-only. If it doesn't payoff substantially with todays hardware it will payoff even less in the future with larger l2 caches, and the prefault logic would blot the VM a lot. If one is emebdded transparent_hugepage can be disabled during boot with sysfs or with the boot commandline parameter transparent_hugepage=0 (or transparent_hugepage=2 to restrict hugepages inside madvise regions) that will ensure not a single hugepage is allocated at boot time. It is simple enough to just disable transparent hugepage globally and let transparent hugepages be allocated selectively by applications in the MADV_HUGEPAGE region (both at page fault time, and if enabled with the collapse_huge_page too through the kernel daemon). This patch supports only hugepages mapped in the pmd, archs that have smaller hugepages will not fit in this patch alone. Also some archs like power have certain tlb limits that prevents mixing different page size in the same regions so they will not fit in this framework that requires "graceful fallback" to basic PAGE_SIZE in case of physical memory fragmentation. hugetlbfs remains a perfect fit for those because its software limits happen to match the hardware limits. hugetlbfs also remains a perfect fit for hugepage sizes like 1GByte that cannot be hoped to be found not fragmented after a certain system uptime and that would be very expensive to defragment with relocation, so requiring reservation. hugetlbfs is the "reservation way", the point of transparent hugepages is not to have any reservation at all and maximizing the use of cache and hugepages at all times automatically. Some performance result: vmx andrea # LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libhugetlbfs.so HUGETLB_MORECORE=yes HUGETLB_PATH=/mnt/huge/ ./largep ages3 memset page fault 1566023 memset tlb miss 453854 memset second tlb miss 453321 random access tlb miss 41635 random access second tlb miss 41658 vmx andrea # LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libhugetlbfs.so HUGETLB_MORECORE=yes HUGETLB_PATH=/mnt/huge/ ./largepages3 memset page fault 1566471 memset tlb miss 453375 memset second tlb miss 453320 random access tlb miss 41636 random access second tlb miss 41637 vmx andrea # ./largepages3 memset page fault 1566642 memset tlb miss 453417 memset second tlb miss 453313 random access tlb miss 41630 random access second tlb miss 41647 vmx andrea # ./largepages3 memset page fault 1566872 memset tlb miss 453418 memset second tlb miss 453315 random access tlb miss 41618 random access second tlb miss 41659 vmx andrea # echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/transparent_hugepage vmx andrea # ./largepages3 memset page fault 2182476 memset tlb miss 460305 memset second tlb miss 460179 random access tlb miss 44483 random access second tlb miss 44186 vmx andrea # ./largepages3 memset page fault 2182791 memset tlb miss 460742 memset second tlb miss 459962 random access tlb miss 43981 random access second tlb miss 43988 ============ #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/time.h> #define SIZE (3UL102410241024) int main() { char p = malloc(SIZE), p2; struct timeval before, after; gettimeofday(&before, NULL); memset(p, 0, SIZE); gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("memset page fault %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); gettimeofday(&before, NULL); memset(p, 0, SIZE); gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("memset tlb miss %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); gettimeofday(&before, NULL); memset(p, 0, SIZE); gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("memset second tlb miss %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); gettimeofday(&before, NULL); for (p2 = p; p2 < p+SIZE; p2 += 4096) p2 = 0; gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("random access tlb miss %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); gettimeofday(&before, NULL); for (p2 = p; p2 < p+SIZE; p2 += 4096) p2 = 0; gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("random access second tlb miss %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); return 0; } ============ Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>		2011-01-13 17:32:42 -08:00
Documentation	thp: transparent hugepage support documentation	2011-01-13 17:32:38 -08:00
arch	thp: transparent hugepage core	2011-01-13 17:32:42 -08:00
block	Merge branch 'for-2.6.38/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block	2011-01-13 10:45:01 -08:00
crypto	Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6	2011-01-13 10:25:58 -08:00
drivers	atmel_serial: fix RTS high after initialization in RS485 mode	2011-01-13 17:32:31 -08:00
firmware	ihex: fix unused return value compiler warning	2011-01-13 08:03:08 -08:00
fs	oom: allow a non-CAP_SYS_RESOURCE proces to oom_score_adj down	2011-01-13 17:32:35 -08:00
include	thp: transparent hugepage core	2011-01-13 17:32:42 -08:00
init	Merge branch 'for-next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial	2011-01-13 10:05:56 -08:00
ipc	fs: icache RCU free inodes	2011-01-07 17:50:26 +11:00
kernel	thp: add pmd_huge_pte to mm_struct	2011-01-13 17:32:41 -08:00
lib	Merge branch 'for-next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial	2011-01-13 10:05:56 -08:00
mm	thp: transparent hugepage core	2011-01-13 17:32:42 -08:00
net	Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs-2.6	2011-01-13 10:27:28 -08:00
samples	kdb: Add kdb kernel module sample	2010-10-29 13:14:39 -05:00
scripts	Merge branch 'for-next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial	2011-01-13 10:05:56 -08:00
security	Merge branch 'for-next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial	2011-01-13 10:05:56 -08:00
sound	Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound-2.6	2011-01-13 10:32:54 -08:00
tools	Merge branch 'tools' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/lenb/linux-idle-2.6	2011-01-12 08:39:15 -08:00
usr	decompressors: add boot-time XZ support	2011-01-13 08:03:25 -08:00
virt/kvm	thp: kvm mmu transparent hugepage support	2011-01-13 17:32:41 -08:00
.gitignore	…
.mailmap	mailmap: Fix up Takashi YOSHII's attribution.	2010-11-24 15:22:09 +09:00
COPYING	…
CREDITS	CREDITS: update Stelian's entry	2011-01-13 08:03:10 -08:00
Kbuild	Merge branch 'kbuild' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mmarek/kbuild-2.6	2010-10-28 15:13:55 -07:00
Kconfig	…
MAINTAINERS	MAINTAINERS: update entries affecting VIA Technologies	2011-01-13 17:32:31 -08:00
Makefile	Merge branch 'kbuild' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mmarek/kbuild-2.6	2011-01-10 08:27:52 -08:00
README	…
REPORTING-BUGS	…

README

	Linux kernel release 2.6.xx <http://kernel.org/>

These are the release notes for Linux version 2.6.  Read them carefully,
as they tell you what this is all about, explain how to install the
kernel, and what to do if something goes wrong. 

WHAT IS LINUX?

  Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by
  Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across
  the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

  It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix,
  including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand
  loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management,
  and multistack networking including IPv4 and IPv6.

  It is distributed under the GNU General Public License - see the
  accompanying COPYING file for more details. 

ON WHAT HARDWARE DOES IT RUN?

  Although originally developed first for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher),
  today Linux also runs on (at least) the Compaq Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC and
  UltraSPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, PowerPC64, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, Cell,
  IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, DEC VAX, AMD x86-64, AXIS CRIS,
  Xtensa, AVR32 and Renesas M32R architectures.

  Linux is easily portable to most general-purpose 32- or 64-bit architectures
  as long as they have a paged memory management unit (PMMU) and a port of the
  GNU C compiler (gcc) (part of The GNU Compiler Collection, GCC). Linux has
  also been ported to a number of architectures without a PMMU, although
  functionality is then obviously somewhat limited.
  Linux has also been ported to itself. You can now run the kernel as a
  userspace application - this is called UserMode Linux (UML).

DOCUMENTATION:

 - There is a lot of documentation available both in electronic form on
   the Internet and in books, both Linux-specific and pertaining to
   general UNIX questions.  I'd recommend looking into the documentation
   subdirectories on any Linux FTP site for the LDP (Linux Documentation
   Project) books.  This README is not meant to be documentation on the
   system: there are much better sources available.

 - There are various README files in the Documentation/ subdirectory:
   these typically contain kernel-specific installation notes for some 
   drivers for example. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what
   is contained in each file.  Please read the Changes file, as it
   contains information about the problems, which may result by upgrading
   your kernel.

 - The Documentation/DocBook/ subdirectory contains several guides for
   kernel developers and users.  These guides can be rendered in a
   number of formats:  PostScript (.ps), PDF, HTML, & man-pages, among others.
   After installation, "make psdocs", "make pdfdocs", "make htmldocs",
   or "make mandocs" will render the documentation in the requested format.

INSTALLING the kernel source:

 - If you install the full sources, put the kernel tarball in a
   directory where you have permissions (eg. your home directory) and
   unpack it:

		gzip -cd linux-2.6.XX.tar.gz | tar xvf -

   or
		bzip2 -dc linux-2.6.XX.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -


   Replace "XX" with the version number of the latest kernel.

   Do NOT use the /usr/src/linux area! This area has a (usually
   incomplete) set of kernel headers that are used by the library header
   files.  They should match the library, and not get messed up by
   whatever the kernel-du-jour happens to be.

 - You can also upgrade between 2.6.xx releases by patching.  Patches are
   distributed in the traditional gzip and the newer bzip2 format.  To
   install by patching, get all the newer patch files, enter the
   top level directory of the kernel source (linux-2.6.xx) and execute:

		gzip -cd ../patch-2.6.xx.gz | patch -p1

   or
		bzip2 -dc ../patch-2.6.xx.bz2 | patch -p1

   (repeat xx for all versions bigger than the version of your current
   source tree, _in_order_) and you should be ok.  You may want to remove
   the backup files (xxx~ or xxx.orig), and make sure that there are no
   failed patches (xxx# or xxx.rej). If there are, either you or me has
   made a mistake.

   Unlike patches for the 2.6.x kernels, patches for the 2.6.x.y kernels
   (also known as the -stable kernels) are not incremental but instead apply
   directly to the base 2.6.x kernel.  Please read
   Documentation/applying-patches.txt for more information.

   Alternatively, the script patch-kernel can be used to automate this
   process.  It determines the current kernel version and applies any
   patches found.

		linux/scripts/patch-kernel linux

   The first argument in the command above is the location of the
   kernel source.  Patches are applied from the current directory, but
   an alternative directory can be specified as the second argument.

 - If you are upgrading between releases using the stable series patches
   (for example, patch-2.6.xx.y), note that these "dot-releases" are
   not incremental and must be applied to the 2.6.xx base tree. For
   example, if your base kernel is 2.6.12 and you want to apply the
   2.6.12.3 patch, you do not and indeed must not first apply the
   2.6.12.1 and 2.6.12.2 patches. Similarly, if you are running kernel
   version 2.6.12.2 and want to jump to 2.6.12.3, you must first
   reverse the 2.6.12.2 patch (that is, patch -R) _before_ applying
   the 2.6.12.3 patch.
   You can read more on this in Documentation/applying-patches.txt

 - Make sure you have no stale .o files and dependencies lying around:

		cd linux
		make mrproper

   You should now have the sources correctly installed.

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

   Compiling and running the 2.6.xx kernels requires up-to-date
   versions of various software packages.  Consult
   Documentation/Changes for the minimum version numbers required
   and how to get updates for these packages.  Beware that using
   excessively old versions of these packages can cause indirect
   errors that are very difficult to track down, so don't assume that
   you can just update packages when obvious problems arise during
   build or operation.

BUILD directory for the kernel:

   When compiling the kernel all output files will per default be
   stored together with the kernel source code.
   Using the option "make O=output/dir" allow you to specify an alternate
   place for the output files (including .config).
   Example:
     kernel source code:	/usr/src/linux-2.6.N
     build directory:		/home/name/build/kernel

   To configure and build the kernel use:
   cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.N
   make O=/home/name/build/kernel menuconfig
   make O=/home/name/build/kernel
   sudo make O=/home/name/build/kernel modules_install install

   Please note: If the 'O=output/dir' option is used then it must be
   used for all invocations of make.

CONFIGURING the kernel:

   Do not skip this step even if you are only upgrading one minor
   version.  New configuration options are added in each release, and
   odd problems will turn up if the configuration files are not set up
   as expected.  If you want to carry your existing configuration to a
   new version with minimal work, use "make oldconfig", which will
   only ask you for the answers to new questions.

 - Alternate configuration commands are:
	"make config"      Plain text interface.
	"make menuconfig"  Text based color menus, radiolists & dialogs.
	"make nconfig"     Enhanced text based color menus.
	"make xconfig"     X windows (Qt) based configuration tool.
	"make gconfig"     X windows (Gtk) based configuration tool.
	"make oldconfig"   Default all questions based on the contents of
			   your existing ./.config file and asking about
			   new config symbols.
	"make silentoldconfig"
			   Like above, but avoids cluttering the screen
			   with questions already answered.
			   Additionally updates the dependencies.
	"make defconfig"   Create a ./.config file by using the default
			   symbol values from either arch/$ARCH/defconfig
			   or arch/$ARCH/configs/${PLATFORM}_defconfig,
			   depending on the architecture.
	"make ${PLATFORM}_defconfig"
			  Create a ./.config file by using the default
			  symbol values from
			  arch/$ARCH/configs/${PLATFORM}_defconfig.
			  Use "make help" to get a list of all available
			  platforms of your architecture.
	"make allyesconfig"
			   Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
			   values to 'y' as much as possible.
	"make allmodconfig"
			   Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
			   values to 'm' as much as possible.
	"make allnoconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
			   values to 'n' as much as possible.
	"make randconfig"  Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
			   values to random values.

   You can find more information on using the Linux kernel config tools
   in Documentation/kbuild/kconfig.txt.

	NOTES on "make config":
	- having unnecessary drivers will make the kernel bigger, and can
	  under some circumstances lead to problems: probing for a
	  nonexistent controller card may confuse your other controllers
	- compiling the kernel with "Processor type" set higher than 386
	  will result in a kernel that does NOT work on a 386.  The
	  kernel will detect this on bootup, and give up.
	- A kernel with math-emulation compiled in will still use the
	  coprocessor if one is present: the math emulation will just
	  never get used in that case.  The kernel will be slightly larger,
	  but will work on different machines regardless of whether they
	  have a math coprocessor or not. 
	- the "kernel hacking" configuration details usually result in a
	  bigger or slower kernel (or both), and can even make the kernel
	  less stable by configuring some routines to actively try to
	  break bad code to find kernel problems (kmalloc()).  Thus you
	  should probably answer 'n' to the questions for
          "development", "experimental", or "debugging" features.

COMPILING the kernel:

 - Make sure you have at least gcc 3.2 available.
   For more information, refer to Documentation/Changes.

   Please note that you can still run a.out user programs with this kernel.

 - Do a "make" to create a compressed kernel image. It is also
   possible to do "make install" if you have lilo installed to suit the
   kernel makefiles, but you may want to check your particular lilo setup first.

   To do the actual install you have to be root, but none of the normal
   build should require that. Don't take the name of root in vain.

 - If you configured any of the parts of the kernel as `modules', you
   will also have to do "make modules_install".

 - Verbose kernel compile/build output:

   Normally the kernel build system runs in a fairly quiet mode (but not
   totally silent).  However, sometimes you or other kernel developers need
   to see compile, link, or other commands exactly as they are executed.
   For this, use "verbose" build mode.  This is done by inserting
   "V=1" in the "make" command.  E.g.:

	make V=1 all

   To have the build system also tell the reason for the rebuild of each
   target, use "V=2".  The default is "V=0".

 - Keep a backup kernel handy in case something goes wrong.  This is 
   especially true for the development releases, since each new release
   contains new code which has not been debugged.  Make sure you keep a
   backup of the modules corresponding to that kernel, as well.  If you
   are installing a new kernel with the same version number as your
   working kernel, make a backup of your modules directory before you
   do a "make modules_install".
   Alternatively, before compiling, use the kernel config option
   "LOCALVERSION" to append a unique suffix to the regular kernel version.
   LOCALVERSION can be set in the "General Setup" menu.

 - In order to boot your new kernel, you'll need to copy the kernel
   image (e.g. .../linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage after compilation)
   to the place where your regular bootable kernel is found. 

 - Booting a kernel directly from a floppy without the assistance of a
   bootloader such as LILO, is no longer supported.

   If you boot Linux from the hard drive, chances are you use LILO which
   uses the kernel image as specified in the file /etc/lilo.conf.  The
   kernel image file is usually /vmlinuz, /boot/vmlinuz, /bzImage or
   /boot/bzImage.  To use the new kernel, save a copy of the old image
   and copy the new image over the old one.  Then, you MUST RERUN LILO
   to update the loading map!! If you don't, you won't be able to boot
   the new kernel image.

   Reinstalling LILO is usually a matter of running /sbin/lilo. 
   You may wish to edit /etc/lilo.conf to specify an entry for your
   old kernel image (say, /vmlinux.old) in case the new one does not
   work.  See the LILO docs for more information. 

   After reinstalling LILO, you should be all set.  Shutdown the system,
   reboot, and enjoy!

   If you ever need to change the default root device, video mode,
   ramdisk size, etc.  in the kernel image, use the 'rdev' program (or
   alternatively the LILO boot options when appropriate).  No need to
   recompile the kernel to change these parameters. 

 - Reboot with the new kernel and enjoy. 

IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG:

 - If you have problems that seem to be due to kernel bugs, please check
   the file MAINTAINERS to see if there is a particular person associated
   with the part of the kernel that you are having trouble with. If there
   isn't anyone listed there, then the second best thing is to mail
   them to me (torvalds@linux-foundation.org), and possibly to any other
   relevant mailing-list or to the newsgroup.

 - In all bug-reports, *please* tell what kernel you are talking about,
   how to duplicate the problem, and what your setup is (use your common
   sense).  If the problem is new, tell me so, and if the problem is
   old, please try to tell me when you first noticed it.

 - If the bug results in a message like

	unable to handle kernel paging request at address C0000010
	Oops: 0002
	EIP:   0010:XXXXXXXX
	eax: xxxxxxxx   ebx: xxxxxxxx   ecx: xxxxxxxx   edx: xxxxxxxx
	esi: xxxxxxxx   edi: xxxxxxxx   ebp: xxxxxxxx
	ds: xxxx  es: xxxx  fs: xxxx  gs: xxxx
	Pid: xx, process nr: xx
	xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx

   or similar kernel debugging information on your screen or in your
   system log, please duplicate it *exactly*.  The dump may look
   incomprehensible to you, but it does contain information that may
   help debugging the problem.  The text above the dump is also
   important: it tells something about why the kernel dumped code (in
   the above example it's due to a bad kernel pointer). More information
   on making sense of the dump is in Documentation/oops-tracing.txt

 - If you compiled the kernel with CONFIG_KALLSYMS you can send the dump
   as is, otherwise you will have to use the "ksymoops" program to make
   sense of the dump (but compiling with CONFIG_KALLSYMS is usually preferred).
   This utility can be downloaded from
   ftp://ftp.<country>.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/ksymoops/ .
   Alternately you can do the dump lookup by hand:

 - In debugging dumps like the above, it helps enormously if you can
   look up what the EIP value means.  The hex value as such doesn't help
   me or anybody else very much: it will depend on your particular
   kernel setup.  What you should do is take the hex value from the EIP
   line (ignore the "0010:"), and look it up in the kernel namelist to
   see which kernel function contains the offending address.

   To find out the kernel function name, you'll need to find the system
   binary associated with the kernel that exhibited the symptom.  This is
   the file 'linux/vmlinux'.  To extract the namelist and match it against
   the EIP from the kernel crash, do:

		nm vmlinux | sort | less

   This will give you a list of kernel addresses sorted in ascending
   order, from which it is simple to find the function that contains the
   offending address.  Note that the address given by the kernel
   debugging messages will not necessarily match exactly with the
   function addresses (in fact, that is very unlikely), so you can't
   just 'grep' the list: the list will, however, give you the starting
   point of each kernel function, so by looking for the function that
   has a starting address lower than the one you are searching for but
   is followed by a function with a higher address you will find the one
   you want.  In fact, it may be a good idea to include a bit of
   "context" in your problem report, giving a few lines around the
   interesting one. 

   If you for some reason cannot do the above (you have a pre-compiled
   kernel image or similar), telling me as much about your setup as
   possible will help.  Please read the REPORTING-BUGS document for details.

 - Alternately, you can use gdb on a running kernel. (read-only; i.e. you
   cannot change values or set break points.) To do this, first compile the
   kernel with -g; edit arch/i386/Makefile appropriately, then do a "make
   clean". You'll also need to enable CONFIG_PROC_FS (via "make config").

   After you've rebooted with the new kernel, do "gdb vmlinux /proc/kcore".
   You can now use all the usual gdb commands. The command to look up the
   point where your system crashed is "l *0xXXXXXXXX". (Replace the XXXes
   with the EIP value.)

   gdb'ing a non-running kernel currently fails because gdb (wrongly)
   disregards the starting offset for which the kernel is compiled.