On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 09:41:19AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> free_pcppages_bulk() has taken two passes through the pcp lists since
> commit 0a5f4e5b4562 ("mm/free_pcppages_bulk: do not hold lock when picking
> pages to free") due to deferring the cost of selecting PCP lists until
> the zone lock is held.
>
> As the list processing now takes place under the zone lock, it's less
> clear that this will always benefit for two reasons.
>
> 1. There is a guaranteed cost to calculating the buddy which definitely
> has to be calculated again. However, as the zone lock is held and
> there is no deferring of buddy merging, there is no guarantee that the
> prefetch will have completed when the second buddy calculation takes
> place and buddies are being merged. With or without the prefetch, there
> may be further stalls depending on how many pages get merged. In other
> words, a stall due to merging is inevitable and at best only one stall
> might be avoided at the cost of calculating the buddy location twice.
>
> 2. As the zone lock is held, prefetch_nr makes less sense as once
> prefetch_nr expires, the cache lines of interest have already been
> merged.
>
> The main concern is that there is a definite cost to calculating the
> buddy location early for the prefetch and it is a "maybe win" depending
> on whether the CPU prefetch logic and memory is fast enough. Remove the
> prefetch logic on the basis that reduced instructions in a path is always
> a saving where as the prefetch might save one memory stall depending on
> the CPU and memory.
>
> In most cases, this has marginal benefit as the calculations are a small
> part of the overall freeing of pages. However, it was detectable on at
> least one machine.
>
> 5.17.0-rc3 5.17.0-rc3
> mm-highpcplimit-v2r1 mm-noprefetch-v1r1
> Min elapsed 630.00 ( 0.00%) 610.00 ( 3.17%)
> Amean elapsed 639.00 ( 0.00%) 623.00 * 2.50%*
> Max elapsed 660.00 ( 0.00%) 660.00 ( 0.00%)
>
> Suggested-by: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@xxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@xxxxxxxxx>
Thanks,
Aaron
> ---
> mm/page_alloc.c | 24 ------------------------
> 1 file changed, 24 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
> index de9f072d23bd..2d5cc098136d 100644
> --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> @@ -1432,15 +1432,6 @@ static bool bulkfree_pcp_prepare(struct page *page)
> }
> #endif /* CONFIG_DEBUG_VM */
>
> -static inline void prefetch_buddy(struct page *page, unsigned int order)
> -{
> - unsigned long pfn = page_to_pfn(page);
> - unsigned long buddy_pfn = __find_buddy_pfn(pfn, order);
> - struct page *buddy = page + (buddy_pfn - pfn);
> -
> - prefetch(buddy);
> -}
> -
> /*
> * Frees a number of pages from the PCP lists
> * Assumes all pages on list are in same zone.
> @@ -1453,7 +1444,6 @@ static void free_pcppages_bulk(struct zone *zone, int count,
> int min_pindex = 0;
> int max_pindex = NR_PCP_LISTS - 1;
> unsigned int order;
> - int prefetch_nr = READ_ONCE(pcp->batch);
> bool isolated_pageblocks;
> struct page *page;
>
> @@ -1508,20 +1498,6 @@ static void free_pcppages_bulk(struct zone *zone, int count,
> if (bulkfree_pcp_prepare(page))
> continue;
>
> - /*
> - * We are going to put the page back to the global
> - * pool, prefetch its buddy to speed up later access
> - * under zone->lock. It is believed the overhead of
> - * an additional test and calculating buddy_pfn here
> - * can be offset by reduced memory latency later. To
> - * avoid excessive prefetching due to large count, only
> - * prefetch buddy for the first pcp->batch nr of pages.
> - */
> - if (prefetch_nr) {
> - prefetch_buddy(page, order);
> - prefetch_nr--;
> - }
> -
> /* MIGRATE_ISOLATE page should not go to pcplists */
> VM_BUG_ON_PAGE(is_migrate_isolate(mt), page);
> /* Pageblock could have been isolated meanwhile */
> --
> 2.26.2
>
