On 02/26/2016 05:15 PM, Mel Gorman wrote:
Changelog since v1 o Default defrag to madvise instead of never o Introduce "defer" defrag option to wake kswapd/kcompact if THP is unavailable o Restore "always" to historical behaviour o Update documentation THP defrag is enabled by default to direct reclaim/compact but not wake kswapd in the event of a THP allocation failure. The problem is that THP allocation requests potentially enter reclaim/compaction. This potentially incurs a severe stall that is not guaranteed to be offset by reduced TLB misses. While there has been considerable effort to reduce the impact of reclaim/compaction, it is still a high cost and workloads that should fit in memory fail to do so. Specifically, a simple anon/file streaming workload will enter direct reclaim on NUMA at least even though the working set size is 80% of RAM. It's been years and it's time to throw in the towel. First, this patch defines THP defrag as follows; madvise: A failed allocation will direct reclaim/compact if the application requests it never: Neither reclaim/compact nor wake kswapd defer: A failed allocation will wake kswapd/kcompactd always: A failed allocation will direct reclaim/compact (historical behaviour) khugepaged defrag will enter direct/reclaim but not wake kswapd. Next it sets the default defrag option to be "madvise" to only enter direct reclaim/compaction for applications that specifically requested it. Lastly, it removes a check from the page allocator slowpath that is related to __GFP_THISNODE to allow "defer" to work. The callers that really cares are slub/slab and they are updated accordingly. The slab one may be surprising because it also corrects a comment as kswapd was never woken up by that path.
It would be also nice if we could remove the is_thp_gfp_mask() checks one day. They try to make direct reclaim/compaction for THP less intrusive, but maybe could be removed now that the stalls are limited otherwise. But that's out of scope here.
[...]
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt b/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt index 8a282687ee06..a19b173cbc57 100644 --- a/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt +++ b/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt @@ -113,9 +113,26 @@ guaranteed, but it may be more likely in case the allocation is for a MADV_HUGEPAGE region. echo always >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag +echo defer >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag echo madvise >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag echo never >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag +"always" means that an application requesting THP will stall on allocation +failure and directly reclaim pages and compact memory in an effort to +allocate a THP immediately. This may be desirable for virtual machines +that benefit heavily from THP use and are willing to delay the VM start +to utilise them. + +"defer" means that an application will wake kswapd in the background +to reclaim pages and wake kcompact to compact memory so that THP is +available in the near future. It's the responsibility of khugepaged +to then install the THP pages later. + +"madvise" will enter direct reclaim like "always" but only for regions +that are have used madvise(). This is the default behaviour.
"madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE)" perhaps? [...]
@@ -277,17 +273,23 @@ static ssize_t double_flag_store(struct kobject *kobj, static ssize_t enabled_show(struct kobject *kobj, struct kobj_attribute *attr, char *buf) { - return double_flag_show(kobj, attr, buf, - TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_FLAG, - TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_REQ_MADV_FLAG); + if (test_bit(TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_FLAG, &transparent_hugepage_flags)) { + VM_BUG_ON(test_bit(TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_REQ_MADV_FLAG, &transparent_hugepage_flags)); + return sprintf(buf, "[always] madvise never\n"); + } else if (test_bit(TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_REQ_MADV_FLAG, &transparent_hugepage_flags)) + return sprintf(buf, "always [madvise] never\n"); + else + return sprintf(buf, "always madvise [never]\n");
Somewhat ugly wrt consistent usage of { }, due to the VM_BUG_ON(), which I would just drop. Also I wonder if some racy read vs write of the file can trigger the BUG_ON? Or are the kobject accesses synchronized at a higher level?
} + static ssize_t enabled_store(struct kobject *kobj, struct kobj_attribute *attr, const char *buf, size_t count) { ssize_t ret; - ret = double_flag_store(kobj, attr, buf, count, + ret = triple_flag_store(kobj, attr, buf, count, + TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_FLAG, TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_FLAG, TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_REQ_MADV_FLAG);
So this makes "echo defer > enabled" behave just like "echo always"? For userspace interface that becomes a fixed ABI, I would prefer to be more careful with unintended aliases like this. Maybe pass something like "-1" that triple_flag_store() would check in the "defer" case and return -EINVAL?
@@ -345,16 +347,23 @@ static ssize_t single_flag_store(struct kobject *kobj, static ssize_t defrag_show(struct kobject *kobj, struct kobj_attribute *attr, char *buf) { - return double_flag_show(kobj, attr, buf, - TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_FLAG, - TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_REQ_MADV_FLAG); + if (test_bit(TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_DIRECT_FLAG, &transparent_hugepage_flags)) + return sprintf(buf, "[always] defer madvise never\n"); + if (test_bit(TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_KSWAPD_FLAG, &transparent_hugepage_flags)) + return sprintf(buf, "always [defer] madvise never\n"); + else if (test_bit(TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_REQ_MADV_FLAG, &transparent_hugepage_flags)) + return sprintf(buf, "always defer [madvise] never\n"); + else + return sprintf(buf, "always defer madvise [never]\n"); + } static ssize_t defrag_store(struct kobject *kobj, struct kobj_attribute *attr, const char *buf, size_t count) { - return double_flag_store(kobj, attr, buf, count, - TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_FLAG, + return triple_flag_store(kobj, attr, buf, count, + TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_DIRECT_FLAG, + TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_KSWAPD_FLAG, TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_REQ_MADV_FLAG); } static struct kobj_attribute defrag_attr = @@ -784,9 +793,30 @@ static int __do_huge_pmd_anonymous_page(struct mm_struct *mm, return 0; } -static inline gfp_t alloc_hugepage_gfpmask(int defrag, gfp_t extra_gfp) +/* + * If THP is set to always then directly reclaim/compact as necessary + * If set to defer then do no reclaim and defer to khugepaged + * If set to madvise and the VMA is flagged then directly reclaim/compact + */ +static inline gfp_t alloc_hugepage_direct_gfpmask(struct vm_area_struct *vma) +{ + gfp_t reclaim_flags = 0; + + if (test_bit(TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_REQ_MADV_FLAG, &transparent_hugepage_flags) && + (vma->vm_flags & VM_HUGEPAGE)) + reclaim_flags = __GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM; + else if (test_bit(TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_KSWAPD_FLAG, &transparent_hugepage_flags)) + reclaim_flags = __GFP_KSWAPD_RECLAIM; + else if (test_bit(TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_DEFRAG_DIRECT_FLAG, &transparent_hugepage_flags)) + reclaim_flags = __GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM;
Hmm, here's a trick question. What if I wanted direct reclaim for madvise() vma's and kswapd/kcompactd for others? Right now there's no such option, right? And expressing that with different values for a single tunable becomes ugly...
(For completeness, somebody could want kswapd/kcompactd defrag only for madvise() but that's arguably not much useful)
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