Hello!
We have some interest in hardware on devices that is cache-coherent
with main memory, and in migrating memory between host memory and
device memory. We believe that we might not be the only ones looking
ahead to hardware like this, so please see below for a draft of some
approaches that we have been thinking of.
Thoughts?
Thanx, Paul
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COHERENT ON-DEVICE MEMORY: ACCESS AND MIGRATION
Ben Herrenschmidt
(As told to Paul E. McKenney)
Special-purpose hardware becoming more prevalent, and some of this
hardware allows for tight interaction with CPU-based processing.
For example, IBM's coherent accelerator processor interface
(CAPI) will allow this sort of device to be constructed,
and it is likely that GPGPUs will need similar capabilities.
(See http://www-304.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/capi/home.html for a
high-level description of CAPI.) Let's call these cache-coherent
accelerator devices (CCAD for short, which should at least
motivate someone to come up with something better).
This document covers devices with the following properties:
1. The device is cache-coherent, in other words, the device's
memory has all the characteristics of system memory from
the viewpoint of CPUs and other devices accessing it.
2. The device provides local memory that it has high-bandwidth
low-latency access to, but the device can also access
normal system memory.
3. The device shares system page tables, so that it can
transparently access userspace virtual memory, regardless
of whether this virtual memory maps to normal system
memory or to memory local to the device.
Although such a device will provide CPU's with cache-coherent
access to on-device memory, the resulting memory latency is
expected to be slower than the normal memory that is tightly
coupled to the CPUs. Nevertheless, data that is only occasionally
accessed by CPUs should be stored in the device's memory.
On the other hand, data that is accessed rarely by the device but
frequently by the CPUs should be stored in normal system memory.
Of course, some workloads will have predictable access patterns
that allow data to be optimally placed up front. However, other
workloads will have less-predictable access patterns, and these
workloads can benefit from automatic migration of data between
device memory and system memory as access patterns change.
Furthermore, some devices will provide special hardware that
collects access statistics that can be used to determine whether
or not a given page of memory should be migrated, and if so,
to where.
The purpose of this document is to explore how this access
and migration can be provided for within the Linux kernel.
REQUIREMENTS
1. It should be possible to remove a given CCAD device
from service, for example, to reset it, to download
updated firmware, or to change its functionality.
This results in the following additional requirements:
a. It should be possible to migrate all data away
from the device's memory at any time.
b. Normal memory allocation should avoid using the
device's memory, as this would interfere
with the needed migration. It may nevertheless
be desirable to use the device's memory
if system memory is exhausted, however, in some
cases, even this "emergency" use is best avoided.
In fact, a good solution will provide some means
for avoiding this for those cases where it is
necessary to evacuate memory when offlining the
device.
2. Memory can be either explicitly or implicitly allocated
from the CCAD device's memory. (Both usermode and kernel
allocation required.)
Please note that implicit allocation will need to be
avoided in a number of use cases. The reason for this
is that random kernel allocations might be pinned into
memory, which could conflict with requirement (1) above,
and might furthermore fragment the device's memory.
3. The device's memory is treated like normal system
memory by the Linux kernel, for example, each page has a
"struct page" associate with it. (In contrast, the
traditional approach has used special-purpose OS mechanisms
to manage the device's memory, and this memory was treated
as MMIO space by the kernel.)
4. The system's normal tuning mechanism may be used to
tune allocation locality, migration, and so on, as
required to match performance and functional requirements.
POTENTIAL IDEAS
It is only reasonable to ask whether CCAD devices can simply
use the HMM patch that has recently been proposed to allow
migration between system and device memory via page faults.
Although this works well for devices whose local MMU can contain
mappings different from that of the system MMU, the HMM patch
is still working with MMIO space that gets special treatment.
The HMM patch does not (yet) provide the full transparency that
would allow the device memory to be treated in the same way as
system memory. Something more is therefore required, for example,
one or more of the following:
1. Model the CCAD device's memory as a memory-only NUMA node
with a very large distance metric. This allows use of
the existing mechanisms for choosing where to satisfy
explicit allocations and where to target migrations.
2. Cover the memory with a CMA to prevent non-migratable
pinned data from being placed in the CCAD device's memory.
It would also permit the driver to perform dedicated
physically contiguous allocations as needed.
3. Add a new ZONE_EXTERNAL zone for all CCAD-like devices.
Note that this would likely require support for
discontinuous zones in order to support large NUMA
systems, in which each node has a single block of the
overall physical address space. In such systems, the
physical address ranges of normal system memory would
be interleaved with those of device memory.
This would also require some sort of
migration infrastructure to be added, as autonuma would
not apply. However, this approach has the advantage
of preventing allocations in these regions, at least
unless those allocations have been explicitly flagged
to go there.
4. Your idea here!
AUTONUMA
The Linux kernel's autonuma facility supports migrating both
memory and processes to promote NUMA memory locality. It was
accepted into 3.13 and is available in RHEL 7.0 and SLES 12.
It is enabled by the Kconfig variable CONFIG_NUMA_BALANCING.
This approach uses a kernel thread "knuma_scand" that periodically
marks pages inaccessible. The page-fault handler notes any
mismatches between the NUMA node that the process is running on
and the NUMA node on which the page resides.
http://lwn.net/Articles/488709/
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/autonuma/autonuma_bench-20120530.pdf
It will be necessary to set up the CCAD device's memory as
a very distant NUMA node, and the architecture-specific
__numa_distance() function can be used for this purpose.
There is a RECLAIM_DISTANCE macro that can be set by the
architecture to prevent reclaiming from nodes that are too
far away. Some experimentation would be required to determine
the combination of values for the various distance macros.
This approach needs some way to pull in data from the hardware
on access patterns. Aneesh Kk Veetil is prototyping an approach
based on Power 8 hardware counters. This data will need to be
plugged into the migration algorithm, which is currently based
on collecting information from page faults.
Finally, the contiguous memory allocator (CMA, see
http://lwn.net/Articles/486301/) is needed in order to prevent
the kernel from placing non-migratable allocations in the CCAD
device's memory. This would need to be of type MIGRATE_CMA to
ensure that all memory taken from that range be migratable.
The result would be that the kernel would allocate only migratable
pages within the CCAD device's memory, and even then only if
memory was otherwise exhausted. Normal CONFIG_NUMA_BALANCING
migration could be brought to bear, possibly enhanced with
information from hardware counters. One remaining issue is that
there is no way to absolutely prevent random kernel subsystems
from allocating the CCAD device's memory, which could cause
failures should the device need to reset itself, in which case
the memory would be temporarily inaccessible -- which could be
a fatal surprise to that kernel subsystem.
MEMORY ZONE
One way to avoid the problem of random kernel subsystems using
the CAPI device's memory is to create a new memory zone for
this purpose. This would add something like ZONE_DEVMEM to the
current set that includes ZONE_DMA, ZONE_NORMAL, and ZONE_MOVABLE.
Currently, there are a maximum of four zones, so this limit must
either be increased or kernels built with ZONE_DEVMEM must avoid
having more than one of ZONE_DMA, ZONE_DMA32, and ZONE_HIGHMEM.
This approach requires that migration be implemented on the side,
as the CONFIG_NUMA_BALANCING will not help here (unless I am
missing something). One advantage of this situation is that
hardware locality measurements could be incorporated from the
beginning. Another advantage is that random kernel subsystems
and user programs would not get CAPI device memory unless they
explicitly requested it.
Code would be needed at boot time to place the CAPI device
memory into ZONE_DEVMEM, perhaps involving changes to
mem_init() and paging_init().
In addition, an appropriate GFP_DEVMEM would be needed, along
with code in various paths to handle it appropriately.
Also, because large NUMA systems will sometimes interleave the
addresses of blocks of physical memory and device memory,
support for discontiguous interleaved zones will be required.
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