On Thu, Mar 01, 2018 at 03:00:44PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote: > On Thu 01-03-18 14:28:45, Aaron Lu wrote: > > When a page is freed back to the global pool, its buddy will be checked > > to see if it's possible to do a merge. This requires accessing buddy's > > page structure and that access could take a long time if it's cache cold. > > > > This patch adds a prefetch to the to-be-freed page's buddy outside of > > zone->lock in hope of accessing buddy's page structure later under > > zone->lock will be faster. Since we *always* do buddy merging and check > > an order-0 page's buddy to try to merge it when it goes into the main > > allocator, the cacheline will always come in, i.e. the prefetched data > > will never be unused. > > > > In the meantime, there are two concerns: > > 1 the prefetch could potentially evict existing cachelines, especially > > for L1D cache since it is not huge; > > 2 there is some additional instruction overhead, namely calculating > > buddy pfn twice. > > > > For 1, it's hard to say, this microbenchmark though shows good result but > > the actual benefit of this patch will be workload/CPU dependant; > > For 2, since the calculation is a XOR on two local variables, it's expected > > in many cases that cycles spent will be offset by reduced memory latency > > later. This is especially true for NUMA machines where multiple CPUs are > > contending on zone->lock and the most time consuming part under zone->lock > > is the wait of 'struct page' cacheline of the to-be-freed pages and their > > buddies. > > > > Test with will-it-scale/page_fault1 full load: > > > > kernel Broadwell(2S) Skylake(2S) Broadwell(4S) Skylake(4S) > > v4.16-rc2+ 9034215 7971818 13667135 15677465 > > patch2/3 9536374 +5.6% 8314710 +4.3% 14070408 +3.0% 16675866 +6.4% > > this patch 10338868 +8.4% 8544477 +2.8% 14839808 +5.5% 17155464 +2.9% > > Note: this patch's performance improvement percent is against patch2/3. > > I am really surprised that this has such a big impact. Is this a win on > other architectures as well? For NUMA machines, I guess so. But I didn't test other archs so can't say for sure. > > > [changelog stole from Dave Hansen and Mel Gorman's comments] > > https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/24/551 > > Please use http://lkml.kernel.org/r/<msg-id> for references because > lkml.org is quite unstable. It would be > http://lkml.kernel.org/r/148a42d8-8306-2f2f-7f7c-86bc118f8ccd@xxxxxxxxx > here. Good to know this, thanks! -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>
