On 19.07.21 09:34, David Hildenbrand wrote:
On 18.07.21 06:30, Qi Zheng wrote:
Hi,
This patch series aims to free user PTE page table pages when all PTE entries
are empty.
The beginning of this story is that some malloc libraries(e.g. jemalloc or
tcmalloc) usually allocate the amount of VAs by mmap() and do not unmap those VAs.
They will use madvise(MADV_DONTNEED) to free physical memory if they want.
But the page tables do not be freed by madvise(), so it can produce many
page tables when the process touches an enormous virtual address space.
... did you see that I am actually looking into this?
https://lkml.kernel.org/r/bae8b967-c206-819d-774c-f57b94c4b362@xxxxxxxxxx
and have already spent a significant time on it as part of my research,
which is *really* unfortunate and makes me quite frustrated at the
beginning of the week alreadty ...
Ripping out page tables is quite difficult, as we have to stop all page
table walkers from touching it, including the fast_gup, rmap and page
faults. This usually involves taking the mmap lock in write. My approach
does page table reclaim asynchronously from another thread and do not
rely on reference counts.
FWIW, I had a quick peek and I like the simplistic approach using
reference counting, although it seems to come with a price. By hooking
using pte_alloc_get_map_lock() instead of pte_alloc_map_lock, we can
handle quite some cases easily.
There are cases where we might immediately see a reuse after discarding
memory (especially, with virtio-balloon free page reporting), in which
case it's suboptimal to immediately discard instead of waiting a bit if
there is a reuse. However, the performance impact seems to be
comparatively small.
I do wonder if the 1% overhead you're seeing is actually because of
allcoating/freeing or because of the reference count handling on some
hot paths.
I'm primarily looking into asynchronous reclaim, because it somewhat
makes sense to only reclaim (+ pay a cost) when there is really need to
reclaim memory -- similar to our shrinker infrastructure.
--
Thanks,
David / dhildenb
