On Tue, May 24, 2022 at 07:45:31PM -0400, 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> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
