Hi Aaron, > page_frag_free() calls __free_pages_ok() to free the page back to > Buddy. This is OK for high order page, but for order-0 pages, it > misses the optimization opportunity of using Per-Cpu-Pages and can > cause zone lock contention when called frequently. > > Paweł Staszewski recently shared his result of 'how Linux kernel > handles normal traffic'[1] and from perf data, Jesper Dangaard Brouer > found the lock contention comes from page allocator: > > mlx5e_poll_tx_cq > | > --16.34%--napi_consume_skb > | > |--12.65%--__free_pages_ok > | | > | --11.86%--free_one_page > | | > | |--10.10%--queued_spin_lock_slowpath > | | > | --0.65%--_raw_spin_lock > | > |--1.55%--page_frag_free > | > --1.44%--skb_release_data > > Jesper explained how it happened: mlx5 driver RX-page recycle > mechanism is not effective in this workload and pages have to go > through the page allocator. The lock contention happens during > mlx5 DMA TX completion cycle. And the page allocator cannot keep > up at these speeds.[2] > > I thought that __free_pages_ok() are mostly freeing high order > pages and thought this is an lock contention for high order pages > but Jesper explained in detail that __free_pages_ok() here are > actually freeing order-0 pages because mlx5 is using order-0 pages > to satisfy its page pool allocation request.[3] > > The free path as pointed out by Jesper is: > skb_free_head() > -> skb_free_frag() > -> skb_free_frag() > -> page_frag_free() > And the pages being freed on this path are order-0 pages. > > Fix this by doing similar things as in __page_frag_cache_drain() - > send the being freed page to PCP if it's an order-0 page, or > directly to Buddy if it is a high order page. > > With this change, Paweł hasn't noticed lock contention yet in > his workload and Jesper has noticed a 7% performance improvement > using a micro benchmark and lock contention is gone. I did the same tests on a 'low' speed 1Gbit interface on an cortex-a53. I used socionext's netsec driver and switched buffer allocation from the current scheme to using page_pool API (which by default allocates order0 pages). Running 'perf top' pre and post patch got me the same results. __free_pages_ok() disappeared from perf top and i got an ~11% performance boost testing with 64byte packets. Acked-by: Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@xxxxxxxxxx> Tested-by: Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@xxxxxxxxxx>
