On Wed, May 29, 2024, Yu Zhao wrote: > On Wed, May 29, 2024 at 12:05 PM James Houghton <jthoughton@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Secondary MMUs are currently consulted for access/age information at > > eviction time, but before then, we don't get accurate age information. > > That is, pages that are mostly accessed through a secondary MMU (like > > guest memory, used by KVM) will always just proceed down to the oldest > > generation, and then at eviction time, if KVM reports the page to be > > young, the page will be activated/promoted back to the youngest > > generation. > > Correct, and as I explained offline, this is the only reasonable > behavior if we can't locklessly walk secondary MMUs. > > Just for the record, the (crude) analogy I used was: > Imagine a large room with many bills ($1, $5, $10, ...) on the floor, > but you are only allowed to pick up 10 of them (and put them in your > pocket). A smart move would be to survey the room *first and then* > pick up the largest ones. But if you are carrying a 500 lbs backpack, > you would just want to pick up whichever that's in front of you rather > than walk the entire room. > > MGLRU should only scan (or lookaround) secondary MMUs if it can be > done lockless. Otherwise, it should just fall back to the existing > approach, which existed in previous versions but is removed in this > version. IIUC, by "existing approach" you mean completely ignore secondary MMUs that don't implement a lockless walk?
