On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 09:39 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Zhang, Yanmin <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> 
> > > great! Yanmin, could you please also check the other patch i sent 
> > > (also attached below), does it solve the regression similarly?
> >
> > With your patch, aim7 regression becomes less than 2%. I ran the 
> > testing twice.
> > 
> > Linus' patch could recover it completely. As aim7 result is quite 
> > stable(usually fluctuating less than 1%), 1.5%~2% is a little big.
> 
> is this the old original aim7 you are running,
I useold AIM7 plus a small patch which is just to change a couple of data type to match
64bit.

>  or osdl-aim-7 or 
> re-aim-7?
> 
> if it's aim7 then this is a workload that starts+stops 2000 parallel 
> tasks that each start and exit at the same time.
Yes.

>  That might explain its 
> sensitivity on the BKL - this is all about tty-controlled task startup 
> and exit.
> 
> i could not get it to produce anywhere close to stable results though. I 
> also frequently get into this problem:
> 
>   AIM Multiuser Benchmark - Suite VII Run Beginning
>   Tasks    jobs/min  jti  jobs/min/task      real       cpu
>    2000
>   Failed to execute
>           new_raph 200
>   Unable to solve equation in 100 tries. P = 1.5708, P0 = 1.5708, delta = 6.12574e-17
> 
>   Failed to execute
>           disk_cp /mnt/shm
>   disk_cp (1): cannot open /mnt/shm/tmpa.common
>   disk1.c: No such file or directory
> 
>   [.. etc. a large stream of them .. ]
> 
> system has 2GB of RAM and tmpfs mounted to the place where aim7 puts its 
> work files.
My machine has 8GB. To simulate your environment, I reserve 6GB for hugetlb, then reran the testing
and didn't see any failure except:
AIM Multiuser Benchmark - Suite VII Run Beginning

Tasks    jobs/min  jti  jobs/min/task      real       cpu
 2000create_shared_memory(): can't create semaphore, pausing...
create_shared_memory(): can't create semaphore, pausing...


Above info doesn't mean errors.

Perhaps you could:
1) Apply the attched aim9 patch;
2) check if you have write right under /mnt/shm;
3) echo "/mnt/shm">aim7_path/config;