On 5/24/22 16:45, Peter Xu wrote:
I observed that for each of the shared file-backed page faults, we're very likely to retry one more time for the 1st write fault upon no page. It's because we'll need to release the mmap lock for dirty rate limit purpose with balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() (in fault_dirty_shared_page()). Then after that throttling we return VM_FAULT_RETRY. We did that probably because VM_FAULT_RETRY is the only way we can return to the fault handler at that time telling it we've released the mmap lock. However that's not ideal because it's very likely the fault does not need to be retried at all since the pgtable was well installed before the throttling, so the next continuous fault (including taking mmap read lock, walk the pgtable, etc.) could be in most cases unnecessary. It's not only slowing down page faults for shared file-backed, but also add more mmap lock contention which is in most cases not needed at all. To observe this, one could try to write to some shmem page and look at "pgfault" value in /proc/vmstat, then we should expect 2 counts for each shmem write simply because we retried, and vm event "pgfault" will capture that. To make it more efficient, add a new VM_FAULT_COMPLETED return code just to show that we've completed the whole fault and released the lock. It's also a hint that we should very possibly not need another fault immediately on this page because we've just completed it. This patch provides a ~12% perf boost on my aarch64 test VM with a simple program sequentially dirtying 400MB shmem file being mmap()ed and these are the time it needs: Before: 650.980 ms (+-1.94%) After: 569.396 ms (+-1.38%) I believe it could help more than that. We need some special care on GUP and the s390 pgfault handler (for gmap code before returning from pgfault), the rest changes in the page fault handlers should be relatively straightforward. Another thing to mention is that mm_account_fault() does take this new fault as a generic fault to be accounted, unlike VM_FAULT_RETRY. I explicitly didn't touch hmm_vma_fault() and break_ksm() because they do not handle VM_FAULT_RETRY even with existing code, so I'm literally keeping them as-is. Signed-off-by: Peter Xu<peterx@xxxxxxxxxx> --- v3: - Rebase to akpm/mm-unstable - Copy arch maintainers --- arch/arc/mm/fault.c | 4 ++++
Acked-by: Vineet Gupta <vgupta@xxxxxxxxxx> Thx, -Vineet
