On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 11:08:13AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > * Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Stop this crap. > > > > I made a really clear and unambiguous chain of arguments: > > > > - I'm unconvinced about the benefits of INVLPG in general, and your patches adds > > a whole new bunch of them. [...] > > ... and note that your claim that 'we were doing them before, this is just an > equivalent transformation' is utter bullsh*t technically: what we were doing > previously was a hideously expensive IPI combined with an INVLPG. > And replacing it with an INVLPG without excessive IPI transmission is changing one major variable. Going straight to a full TLB flush is changing two major variables. I thought the refill cost was high, parially based on the estimate of 22,000 cycles in https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/7/31/825. I've been told in these discussions that I'm wrong and the cost is not high. As it'll always be variable, we can never be sure which is why I do not see a value to building a complex test around it that will be invalidated the instant we use a different CPU. When/if a workload shows up that really cares about those refill costs then there will be a stable test case to work from. > The behavior was dominated by the huge overhead of the remote flushing IPI, which > does not prove or disprove either your or my opinion! > > Preserving that old INVLPG logic without measuring its benefits _again_ would be > cargo cult programming. > > So I think this should be measured, and I don't mind worst-case TLB trashing > measurements, which would be relatively straightforward to construct and the > results should be unambiguous. > > The batching limit (which you set to 32) should then be tuned by comparing it to a > working full-flushing batching logic, not by comparing it to the previous single > IPI per single flush approach! > We can decrease it easily but increasing it means we also have to change SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX because otherwise enough pages are not unmapped for flushes and it is a requirement that we flush before freeing the pages. That changes another complex variable because at the very least, it alters LRU lock hold times. > ... and if the benefits of a complex algorithm are not measurable and if there are > doubts about the cost/benefit tradeoff then frankly it should not exist in the > kernel in the first place. It's not like the Linux TLB flushing code is too boring > due to overwhelming simplicity. > > and yes, it's my job as a maintainer to request measurements justifying complexity > and your ad hominem attacks against me are disgusting - you should know better. > It was not intended as an ad hominem attack and my apologies for that. I wanted to express my frustration that a series that adjusted one variable with known benefit will be rejected for a series that adjusts two major variables instead with the second variable being very sensitive to workload and CPU. -- Mel Gorman SUSE Labs -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>