To optimize page placement in a memory tiering system with NUMA balancing, the hot pages in the slow memory node need to be identified. Essentially, the original NUMA balancing implementation selects the mostly recently accessed (MRU) pages to promote. But this isn't a perfect algorithm to identify the hot pages. Because the pages with quite low access frequency may be accessed eventually given the NUMA balancing page table scanning period could be quite long (e.g. 60 seconds). So in this patchset, we implement a new hot page identification algorithm based on the latency between NUMA balancing page table scanning and hint page fault. Which is a kind of mostly frequently accessed (MFU) algorithm. In NUMA balancing memory tiering mode, if there are hot pages in slow memory node and cold pages in fast memory node, we need to promote/demote hot/cold pages between the fast and cold memory nodes. A choice is to promote/demote as fast as possible. But the CPU cycles and memory bandwidth consumed by the high promoting/demoting throughput will hurt the latency of some workload because of accessing inflating and slow memory bandwidth contention. A way to resolve this issue is to restrict the max promoting/demoting throughput. It will take longer to finish the promoting/demoting. But the workload latency will be better. This is implemented in this patchset as the page promotion rate limit mechanism. The promotion hot threshold is workload and system configuration dependent. So in this patchset, a method to adjust the hot threshold automatically is implemented. The basic idea is to control the number of the candidate promotion pages to match the promotion rate limit. We used the pmbench memory accessing benchmark tested the patchset on a 2-socket server system with DRAM and PMEM installed. The test results are as follows, pmbench score promote rate (accesses/s) MB/s ------------- ------------ base 146887704.1 725.6 hot selection 165695601.2 544.0 rate limit 162814569.8 165.2 auto adjustment 170495294.0 136.9 >From the results above, With hot page selection patch [1/3], the pmbench score increases about 12.8%, and promote rate (overhead) decreases about 25.0%, compared with base kernel. With rate limit patch [2/3], pmbench score decreases about 1.7%, and promote rate decreases about 69.6%, compared with hot page selection patch. With threshold auto adjustment patch [3/3], pmbench score increases about 4.7%, and promote rate decrease about 17.1%, compared with rate limit patch. Changelog: v2: - Added ABI document for promote rate limit per Andrew's comments. Thanks! - Added function comments when necessary per Andrew's comments. - Address other comments from Andrew Morton. Best Regards, Huang, Ying
