Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt | 3 +-
Documentation/admin-guide/mm/index.rst | 1 +
Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst | 418 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
Documentation/vm/transhuge.rst | 414 +----------------------
4 files changed, 423 insertions(+), 413 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
index 42f3e28..8d24270 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -4313,7 +4313,8 @@
Format: [always|madvise|never]
Can be used to control the default behavior of the system
with respect to transparent hugepages.
- See Documentation/vm/transhuge.rst for more details.
+ See Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
+ for more details.
tsc= Disable clocksource stability checks for TSC.
Format: <string>
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/index.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/index.rst
index a69aa69..8454be6 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/index.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/index.rst
@@ -27,4 +27,5 @@ the Linux memory management.
numa_memory_policy
pagemap
soft-dirty
+ transhuge
userfaultfd
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7ab93a8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,418 @@
+.. _admin_guide_transhuge:
+
+============================
+Transparent Hugepage Support
+============================
+
+Objective
+=========
+
+Performance critical computing applications dealing with large memory
+working sets are already running on top of libhugetlbfs and in turn
+hugetlbfs. Transparent HugePage Support (THP) is an alternative mean of
+using huge pages for the backing of virtual memory with huge pages
+that supports the automatic promotion and demotion of page sizes and
+without the shortcomings of hugetlbfs.
+
+Currently THP only works for anonymous memory mappings and tmpfs/shmem.
+But in the future it can expand to other filesystems.
+
+.. note::
+ in the examples below we presume that the basic page size is 4K and
+ the huge page size is 2M, although the actual numbers may vary
+ depending on the CPU architecture.
+
+The reason applications are running faster is because of two
+factors. The first factor is almost completely irrelevant and it's not
+of significant interest because it'll also have the downside of
+requiring larger clear-page copy-page in page faults which is a
+potentially negative effect. The first factor consists in taking a
+single page fault for each 2M virtual region touched by userland (so
+reducing the enter/exit kernel frequency by a 512 times factor). This
+only matters the first time the memory is accessed for the lifetime of
+a memory mapping. The second long lasting and much more important
+factor will affect all subsequent accesses to the memory for the whole
+runtime of the application. The second factor consist of two
+components:
+
+1) the TLB miss will run faster (especially with virtualization using
+ nested pagetables but almost always also on bare metal without
+ virtualization)
+
+2) a single TLB entry will be mapping a much larger amount of virtual
+ memory in turn reducing the number of TLB misses. With
+ virtualization and nested pagetables the TLB can be mapped of
+ larger size only if both KVM and the Linux guest are using
+ hugepages but a significant speedup already happens if only one of
+ the two is using hugepages just because of the fact the TLB miss is
+ going to run faster.
+
+THP can be enabled system wide or restricted to certain tasks or even
+memory ranges inside task's address space. Unless THP is completely
+disabled, there is ``khugepaged`` daemon that scans memory and
+collapses sequences of basic pages into huge pages.
+
+The THP behaviour is controlled via :ref:`sysfs <thp_sysfs>`
+interface and using madivse(2) and prctl(2) system calls.
+
+Transparent Hugepage Support maximizes the usefulness of free memory
+if compared to the reservation approach of hugetlbfs by allowing all
+unused memory to be used as cache or other movable (or even unmovable
+entities). It doesn't require reservation to prevent hugepage
+allocation failures to be noticeable from userland. It allows paging
+and all other advanced VM features to be available on the
+hugepages. It requires no modifications for applications to take
+advantage of it.
+
+Applications however can be further optimized to take advantage of
+this feature, like for example they've been optimized before to avoid
+a flood of mmap system calls for every malloc(4k). Optimizing userland
+is by far not mandatory and khugepaged already can take care of long
+lived page allocations even for hugepage unaware applications that
+deals with large amounts of memory.
+
+In certain cases when hugepages are enabled system wide, application
+may end up allocating more memory resources. An application may mmap a
+large region but only touch 1 byte of it, in that case a 2M page might
+be allocated instead of a 4k page for no good. This is why it's
+possible to disable hugepages system-wide and to only have them inside
+MADV_HUGEPAGE madvise regions.
+
+Embedded systems should enable hugepages only inside madvise regions
+to eliminate any risk of wasting any precious byte of memory and to
+only run faster.
+
+Applications that gets a lot of benefit from hugepages and that don't
+risk to lose memory by using hugepages, should use
+madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) on their critical mmapped regions.
+
+.. _thp_sysfs:
+
+sysfs
+=====
+
+Global THP controls
+-------------------
+
+Transparent Hugepage Support for anonymous memory can be entirely disabled
+(mostly for debugging purposes) or only enabled inside MADV_HUGEPAGE
+regions (to avoid the risk of consuming more memory resources) or enabled
+system wide. This can be achieved with one of::
+
+ echo always >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
+ echo madvise >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
+ echo never >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
+
+It's also possible to limit defrag efforts in the VM to generate
+anonymous hugepages in case they're not immediately free to madvise
+regions or to never try to defrag memory and simply fallback to regular
+pages unless hugepages are immediately available. Clearly if we spend CPU
+time to defrag memory, we would expect to gain even more by the fact we
+use hugepages later instead of regular pages. This isn't always
+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 defer+madvise >/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 kcompactd 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.
+
+defer+madvise
+ will enter direct reclaim and compaction like ``always``, but
+ only for regions that have used madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE); all
+ other regions will wake kswapd in the background to reclaim
+ pages and wake kcompactd to compact memory so that THP is
+ available in the near future.
+
+madvise
+ will enter direct reclaim like ``always`` but only for regions
+ that are have used madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE). This is the default
+ behaviour.
+
+never
+ should be self-explanatory.
+
+By default kernel tries to use huge zero page on read page fault to
+anonymous mapping. It's possible to disable huge zero page by writing 0
+or enable it back by writing 1::
+
+ echo 0 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/use_zero_page
+ echo 1 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/use_zero_page
+
+Some userspace (such as a test program, or an optimized memory allocation
+library) may want to know the size (in bytes) of a transparent hugepage::
+
+ cat /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hpage_pmd_size
+
+khugepaged will be automatically started when
+transparent_hugepage/enabled is set to "always" or "madvise, and it'll
+be automatically shutdown if it's set to "never".
+
+Khugepaged controls
+-------------------
+
+khugepaged runs usually at low frequency so while one may not want to
+invoke defrag algorithms synchronously during the page faults, it
+should be worth invoking defrag at least in khugepaged. However it's
+also possible to disable defrag in khugepaged by writing 0 or enable
+defrag in khugepaged by writing 1::
+
+ echo 0 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag
+ echo 1 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag
+
+You can also control how many pages khugepaged should scan at each
+pass::
+
+ /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_to_scan
+
+and how many milliseconds to wait in khugepaged between each pass (you
+can set this to 0 to run khugepaged at 100% utilization of one core)::
+
+ /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/scan_sleep_millisecs
+
+and how many milliseconds to wait in khugepaged if there's an hugepage
+allocation failure to throttle the next allocation attempt::
+
+ /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/alloc_sleep_millisecs
+
+The khugepaged progress can be seen in the number of pages collapsed::
+
+ /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_collapsed
+
+for each pass::
+
+ /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/full_scans
+
+``max_ptes_none`` specifies how many extra small pages (that are
+not already mapped) can be allocated when collapsing a group
+of small pages into one large page::
+
+ /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_none
+
+A higher value leads to use additional memory for programs.
+A lower value leads to gain less thp performance. Value of
+max_ptes_none can waste cpu time very little, you can
+ignore it.
+
+``max_ptes_swap`` specifies how many pages can be brought in from
+swap when collapsing a group of pages into a transparent huge page::
+
+ /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_swap
+
+A higher value can cause excessive swap IO and waste
+memory. A lower value can prevent THPs from being
+collapsed, resulting fewer pages being collapsed into
+THPs, and lower memory access performance.
+
+Boot parameter
+==============
+
+You can change the sysfs boot time defaults of Transparent Hugepage
+Support by passing the parameter ``transparent_hugepage=always`` or
+``transparent_hugepage=madvise`` or ``transparent_hugepage=never``
+to the kernel command line.
+
+Hugepages in tmpfs/shmem
+========================
+
+You can control hugepage allocation policy in tmpfs with mount option
+``huge=``. It can have following values:
+
+always
+ Attempt to allocate huge pages every time we need a new page;
+
+never
+ Do not allocate huge pages;
+
+within_size
+ Only allocate huge page if it will be fully within i_size.
+ Also respect fadvise()/madvise() hints;
+
+advise
+ Only allocate huge pages if requested with fadvise()/madvise();
+
+The default policy is ``never``.
+
+``mount -o remount,huge= /mountpoint`` works fine after mount: remounting
+``huge=never`` will not attempt to break up huge pages at all, just stop more
+from being allocated.
+
+There's also sysfs knob to control hugepage allocation policy for internal
+shmem mount: /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/shmem_enabled. The mount
+is used for SysV SHM, memfds, shared anonymous mmaps (of /dev/zero or
+MAP_ANONYMOUS), GPU drivers' DRM objects, Ashmem.
+
+In addition to policies listed above, shmem_enabled allows two further
+values:
+
+deny
+ For use in emergencies, to force the huge option off from
+ all mounts;
+force
+ Force the huge option on for all - very useful for testing;
+
+Need of application restart
+===========================
+
+The transparent_hugepage/enabled values and tmpfs mount option only affect
+future behavior. So to make them effective you need to restart any
+application that could have been using hugepages. This also applies to the
+regions registered in khugepaged.
+
+Monitoring usage
+================
+
+The number of anonymous transparent huge pages currently used by the
+system is available by reading the AnonHugePages field in ``/proc/meminfo``.
+To identify what applications are using anonymous transparent huge pages,
+it is necessary to read ``/proc/PID/smaps`` and count the AnonHugePages fields
+for each mapping.
+
+The number of file transparent huge pages mapped to userspace is available
+by reading ShmemPmdMapped and ShmemHugePages fields in ``/proc/meminfo``.
+To identify what applications are mapping file transparent huge pages, it
+is necessary to read ``/proc/PID/smaps`` and count the FileHugeMapped fields
+for each mapping.
+
+Note that reading the smaps file is expensive and reading it
+frequently will incur overhead.
+
+There are a number of counters in ``/proc/vmstat`` that may be used to
+monitor how successfully the system is providing huge pages for use.
+
+thp_fault_alloc
+ is incremented every time a huge page is successfully
+ allocated to handle a page fault. This applies to both the
+ first time a page is faulted and for COW faults.
+
+thp_collapse_alloc
+ is incremented by khugepaged when it has found
+ a range of pages to collapse into one huge page and has
+ successfully allocated a new huge page to store the data.
+
+thp_fault_fallback
+ is incremented if a page fault fails to allocate
+ a huge page and instead falls back to using small pages.
+
+thp_collapse_alloc_failed
+ is incremented if khugepaged found a range
+ of pages that should be collapsed into one huge page but failed
+ the allocation.
+
+thp_file_alloc
+ is incremented every time a file huge page is successfully
+ allocated.
+
+thp_file_mapped
+ is incremented every time a file huge page is mapped into
+ user address space.
+
+thp_split_page
+ is incremented every time a huge page is split into base
+ pages. This can happen for a variety of reasons but a common
+ reason is that a huge page is old and is being reclaimed.
+ This action implies splitting all PMD the page mapped with.
+
+thp_split_page_failed
+ is incremented if kernel fails to split huge
+ page. This can happen if the page was pinned by somebody.
+
+thp_deferred_split_page
+ is incremented when a huge page is put onto split
+ queue. This happens when a huge page is partially unmapped and
+ splitting it would free up some memory. Pages on split queue are
+ going to be split under memory pressure.
+
+thp_split_pmd
+ is incremented every time a PMD split into table of PTEs.
+ This can happen, for instance, when application calls mprotect() or
+ munmap() on part of huge page. It doesn't split huge page, only
+ page table entry.
+
+thp_zero_page_alloc
+ is incremented every time a huge zero page is
+ successfully allocated. It includes allocations which where
+ dropped due race with other allocation. Note, it doesn't count
+ every map of the huge zero page, only its allocation.
+
+thp_zero_page_alloc_failed
+ is incremented if kernel fails to allocate
+ huge zero page and falls back to using small pages.
+
+thp_swpout
+ is incremented every time a huge page is swapout in one
+ piece without splitting.
+
+thp_swpout_fallback
+ is incremented if a huge page has to be split before swapout.
+ Usually because failed to allocate some continuous swap space
+ for the huge page.
+
+As the system ages, allocating huge pages may be expensive as the
+system uses memory compaction to copy data around memory to free a
+huge page for use. There are some counters in ``/proc/vmstat`` to help
+monitor this overhead.
+
+compact_stall
+ is incremented every time a process stalls to run
+ memory compaction so that a huge page is free for use.
+
+compact_success
+ is incremented if the system compacted memory and
+ freed a huge page for use.
+
+compact_fail
+ is incremented if the system tries to compact memory
+ but failed.
+
+compact_pages_moved
+ is incremented each time a page is moved. If
+ this value is increasing rapidly, it implies that the system
+ is copying a lot of data to satisfy the huge page allocation.
+ It is possible that the cost of copying exceeds any savings
+ from reduced TLB misses.
+
+compact_pagemigrate_failed
+ is incremented when the underlying mechanism
+ for moving a page failed.
+
+compact_blocks_moved
+ is incremented each time memory compaction examines
+ a huge page aligned range of pages.
+
+It is possible to establish how long the stalls were using the function
+tracer to record how long was spent in __alloc_pages_nodemask and
+using the mm_page_alloc tracepoint to identify which allocations were
+for huge pages.
+
+Optimizing the applications
+===========================
+
+To be guaranteed that the kernel will map a 2M page immediately in any
+memory region, the mmap region has to be hugepage naturally
+aligned. posix_memalign() can provide that guarantee.
+
+Hugetlbfs
+=========
+
+You can use hugetlbfs on a kernel that has transparent hugepage
+support enabled just fine as always. No difference can be noted in
+hugetlbfs other than there will be less overall fragmentation. All
+usual features belonging to hugetlbfs are preserved and
+unaffected. libhugetlbfs will also work fine as usual.
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/transhuge.rst b/Documentation/vm/transhuge.rst
index 47c7e47..a8cf680 100644
--- a/Documentation/vm/transhuge.rst
+++ b/Documentation/vm/transhuge.rst
@@ -4,418 +4,8 @@
Transparent Hugepage Support
============================
-Objective
-=========
-
-Performance critical computing applications dealing with large memory
-working sets are already running on top of libhugetlbfs and in turn
-hugetlbfs. Transparent HugePage Support (THP) is an alternative mean of
-using huge pages for the backing of virtual memory with huge pages
-that supports the automatic promotion and demotion of page sizes and
-without the shortcomings of hugetlbfs.
-
-Currently THP only works for anonymous memory mappings and tmpfs/shmem.
-But in the future it can expand to other filesystems.
-
-.. note::
- in the examples below we presume that the basic page size is 4K and
- the huge page size is 2M, although the actual numbers may vary
- depending on the CPU architecture.
-
-The reason applications are running faster is because of two
-factors. The first factor is almost completely irrelevant and it's not
-of significant interest because it'll also have the downside of
-requiring larger clear-page copy-page in page faults which is a
-potentially negative effect. The first factor consists in taking a
-single page fault for each 2M virtual region touched by userland (so
-reducing the enter/exit kernel frequency by a 512 times factor). This
-only matters the first time the memory is accessed for the lifetime of
-a memory mapping. The second long lasting and much more important
-factor will affect all subsequent accesses to the memory for the whole
-runtime of the application. The second factor consist of two
-components:
-
-1) the TLB miss will run faster (especially with virtualization using
- nested pagetables but almost always also on bare metal without
- virtualization)
-
-2) a single TLB entry will be mapping a much larger amount of virtual
- memory in turn reducing the number of TLB misses. With
- virtualization and nested pagetables the TLB can be mapped of
- larger size only if both KVM and the Linux guest are using
- hugepages but a significant speedup already happens if only one of
- the two is using hugepages just because of the fact the TLB miss is
- going to run faster.
-
-THP can be enabled system wide or restricted to certain tasks or even
-memory ranges inside task's address space. Unless THP is completely
-disabled, there is ``khugepaged`` daemon that scans memory and
-collapses sequences of basic pages into huge pages.
-
-The THP behaviour is controlled via :ref:`sysfs <thp_sysfs>`
-interface and using madivse(2) and prctl(2) system calls.
-
-Transparent Hugepage Support maximizes the usefulness of free memory
-if compared to the reservation approach of hugetlbfs by allowing all
-unused memory to be used as cache or other movable (or even unmovable
-entities). It doesn't require reservation to prevent hugepage
-allocation failures to be noticeable from userland. It allows paging
-and all other advanced VM features to be available on the
-hugepages. It requires no modifications for applications to take
-advantage of it.
-
-Applications however can be further optimized to take advantage of
-this feature, like for example they've been optimized before to avoid
-a flood of mmap system calls for every malloc(4k). Optimizing userland
-is by far not mandatory and khugepaged already can take care of long
-lived page allocations even for hugepage unaware applications that
-deals with large amounts of memory.
-
-In certain cases when hugepages are enabled system wide, application
-may end up allocating more memory resources. An application may mmap a
-large region but only touch 1 byte of it, in that case a 2M page might
-be allocated instead of a 4k page for no good. This is why it's
-possible to disable hugepages system-wide and to only have them inside
-MADV_HUGEPAGE madvise regions.
-
-Embedded systems should enable hugepages only inside madvise regions
-to eliminate any risk of wasting any precious byte of memory and to
-only run faster.
-
-Applications that gets a lot of benefit from hugepages and that don't
-risk to lose memory by using hugepages, should use
-madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) on their critical mmapped regions.
-
-.. _thp_sysfs:
-
-sysfs
-=====
-
-Global THP controls
--------------------
-
-Transparent Hugepage Support for anonymous memory can be entirely disabled
-(mostly for debugging purposes) or only enabled inside MADV_HUGEPAGE
-regions (to avoid the risk of consuming more memory resources) or enabled
-system wide. This can be achieved with one of::
-
- echo always >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
- echo madvise >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
- echo never >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
-
-It's also possible to limit defrag efforts in the VM to generate
-anonymous hugepages in case they're not immediately free to madvise
-regions or to never try to defrag memory and simply fallback to regular
-pages unless hugepages are immediately available. Clearly if we spend CPU
-time to defrag memory, we would expect to gain even more by the fact we
-use hugepages later instead of regular pages. This isn't always
-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 defer+madvise >/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 kcompactd 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.
-
-defer+madvise
- will enter direct reclaim and compaction like ``always``, but
- only for regions that have used madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE); all
- other regions will wake kswapd in the background to reclaim
- pages and wake kcompactd to compact memory so that THP is
- available in the near future.
-
-madvise
- will enter direct reclaim like ``always`` but only for regions
- that are have used madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE). This is the default
- behaviour.
-
-never
- should be self-explanatory.
-
-By default kernel tries to use huge zero page on read page fault to
-anonymous mapping. It's possible to disable huge zero page by writing 0
-or enable it back by writing 1::
-
- echo 0 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/use_zero_page
- echo 1 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/use_zero_page
-
-Some userspace (such as a test program, or an optimized memory allocation
-library) may want to know the size (in bytes) of a transparent hugepage::
-
- cat /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hpage_pmd_size
-
-khugepaged will be automatically started when
-transparent_hugepage/enabled is set to "always" or "madvise, and it'll
-be automatically shutdown if it's set to "never".
-
-Khugepaged controls
--------------------
-
-khugepaged runs usually at low frequency so while one may not want to
-invoke defrag algorithms synchronously during the page faults, it
-should be worth invoking defrag at least in khugepaged. However it's
-also possible to disable defrag in khugepaged by writing 0 or enable
-defrag in khugepaged by writing 1::
-
- echo 0 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag
- echo 1 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag
-
-You can also control how many pages khugepaged should scan at each
-pass::
-
- /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_to_scan
-
-and how many milliseconds to wait in khugepaged between each pass (you
-can set this to 0 to run khugepaged at 100% utilization of one core)::
-
- /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/scan_sleep_millisecs
-
-and how many milliseconds to wait in khugepaged if there's an hugepage
-allocation failure to throttle the next allocation attempt::
-
- /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/alloc_sleep_millisecs
-
-The khugepaged progress can be seen in the number of pages collapsed::
-
- /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_collapsed
-
-for each pass::
-
- /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/full_scans
-
-``max_ptes_none`` specifies how many extra small pages (that are
-not already mapped) can be allocated when collapsing a group
-of small pages into one large page::
-
- /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_none
-
-A higher value leads to use additional memory for programs.
-A lower value leads to gain less thp performance. Value of
-max_ptes_none can waste cpu time very little, you can
-ignore it.
-
-``max_ptes_swap`` specifies how many pages can be brought in from
-swap when collapsing a group of pages into a transparent huge page::
-
- /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_swap
-
-A higher value can cause excessive swap IO and waste
-memory. A lower value can prevent THPs from being
-collapsed, resulting fewer pages being collapsed into
-THPs, and lower memory access performance.
-
-Boot parameter
-==============
-
-You can change the sysfs boot time defaults of Transparent Hugepage
-Support by passing the parameter ``transparent_hugepage=always`` or
-``transparent_hugepage=madvise`` or ``transparent_hugepage=never``
-to the kernel command line.
-
-Hugepages in tmpfs/shmem
-========================
-
-You can control hugepage allocation policy in tmpfs with mount option
-``huge=``. It can have following values:
-
-always
- Attempt to allocate huge pages every time we need a new page;
-
-never
- Do not allocate huge pages;
-
-within_size
- Only allocate huge page if it will be fully within i_size.
- Also respect fadvise()/madvise() hints;
-
-advise
- Only allocate huge pages if requested with fadvise()/madvise();
-
-The default policy is ``never``.
-
-``mount -o remount,huge= /mountpoint`` works fine after mount: remounting
-``huge=never`` will not attempt to break up huge pages at all, just stop more
-from being allocated.
-
-There's also sysfs knob to control hugepage allocation policy for internal
-shmem mount: /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/shmem_enabled. The mount
-is used for SysV SHM, memfds, shared anonymous mmaps (of /dev/zero or
-MAP_ANONYMOUS), GPU drivers' DRM objects, Ashmem.
-
-In addition to policies listed above, shmem_enabled allows two further
-values:
-
-deny
- For use in emergencies, to force the huge option off from
- all mounts;
-force
- Force the huge option on for all - very useful for testing;
-
-Need of application restart
-===========================
-
-The transparent_hugepage/enabled values and tmpfs mount option only affect
-future behavior. So to make them effective you need to restart any
-application that could have been using hugepages. This also applies to the
-regions registered in khugepaged.
-
-Monitoring usage
-================
-
-The number of anonymous transparent huge pages currently used by the
-system is available by reading the AnonHugePages field in ``/proc/meminfo``.
-To identify what applications are using anonymous transparent huge pages,
-it is necessary to read ``/proc/PID/smaps`` and count the AnonHugePages fields
-for each mapping.
-
-The number of file transparent huge pages mapped to userspace is available
-by reading ShmemPmdMapped and ShmemHugePages fields in ``/proc/meminfo``.
-To identify what applications are mapping file transparent huge pages, it
-is necessary to read ``/proc/PID/smaps`` and count the FileHugeMapped fields
-for each mapping.
-
-Note that reading the smaps file is expensive and reading it
-frequently will incur overhead.
-
-There are a number of counters in ``/proc/vmstat`` that may be used to
-monitor how successfully the system is providing huge pages for use.
-
-thp_fault_alloc
- is incremented every time a huge page is successfully
- allocated to handle a page fault. This applies to both the
- first time a page is faulted and for COW faults.
-
-thp_collapse_alloc
- is incremented by khugepaged when it has found
- a range of pages to collapse into one huge page and has
- successfully allocated a new huge page to store the data.
-
-thp_fault_fallback
- is incremented if a page fault fails to allocate
- a huge page and instead falls back to using small pages.
-
-thp_collapse_alloc_failed
- is incremented if khugepaged found a range
- of pages that should be collapsed into one huge page but failed
- the allocation.
-
-thp_file_alloc
- is incremented every time a file huge page is successfully
- allocated.
-
-thp_file_mapped
- is incremented every time a file huge page is mapped into
- user address space.
-
-thp_split_page
- is incremented every time a huge page is split into base
- pages. This can happen for a variety of reasons but a common
- reason is that a huge page is old and is being reclaimed.
- This action implies splitting all PMD the page mapped with.
-
-thp_split_page_failed
- is incremented if kernel fails to split huge
- page. This can happen if the page was pinned by somebody.
-
-thp_deferred_split_page
- is incremented when a huge page is put onto split
- queue. This happens when a huge page is partially unmapped and
- splitting it would free up some memory. Pages on split queue are
- going to be split under memory pressure.
-
-thp_split_pmd
- is incremented every time a PMD split into table of PTEs.
- This can happen, for instance, when application calls mprotect() or
- munmap() on part of huge page. It doesn't split huge page, only
- page table entry.
-
-thp_zero_page_alloc
- is incremented every time a huge zero page is
- successfully allocated. It includes allocations which where
- dropped due race with other allocation. Note, it doesn't count
- every map of the huge zero page, only its allocation.
-
-thp_zero_page_alloc_failed
- is incremented if kernel fails to allocate
- huge zero page and falls back to using small pages.
-
-thp_swpout
- is incremented every time a huge page is swapout in one
- piece without splitting.
-
-thp_swpout_fallback
- is incremented if a huge page has to be split before swapout.
- Usually because failed to allocate some continuous swap space
- for the huge page.
-
-As the system ages, allocating huge pages may be expensive as the
-system uses memory compaction to copy data around memory to free a
-huge page for use. There are some counters in ``/proc/vmstat`` to help
-monitor this overhead.
-
-compact_stall
- is incremented every time a process stalls to run
- memory compaction so that a huge page is free for use.
-
-compact_success
- is incremented if the system compacted memory and
- freed a huge page for use.
-
-compact_fail
- is incremented if the system tries to compact memory
- but failed.
-
-compact_pages_moved
- is incremented each time a page is moved. If
- this value is increasing rapidly, it implies that the system
- is copying a lot of data to satisfy the huge page allocation.
- It is possible that the cost of copying exceeds any savings
- from reduced TLB misses.
-
-compact_pagemigrate_failed
- is incremented when the underlying mechanism
- for moving a page failed.
-
-compact_blocks_moved
- is incremented each time memory compaction examines
- a huge page aligned range of pages.
-
-It is possible to establish how long the stalls were using the function
-tracer to record how long was spent in __alloc_pages_nodemask and
-using the mm_page_alloc tracepoint to identify which allocations were
-for huge pages.
-
-Optimizing the applications
-===========================
-
-To be guaranteed that the kernel will map a 2M page immediately in any
-memory region, the mmap region has to be hugepage naturally
-aligned. posix_memalign() can provide that guarantee.
-
-Hugetlbfs
-=========
-
-You can use hugetlbfs on a kernel that has transparent hugepage
-support enabled just fine as always. No difference can be noted in
-hugetlbfs other than there will be less overall fragmentation. All
-usual features belonging to hugetlbfs are preserved and
-unaffected. libhugetlbfs will also work fine as usual.
+This document describes design principles Transparent Hugepage (THP)
+Support and its interaction with other parts of the memory management.
Design principles
=================
--
2.7.4
