Re: [PATCH] mm: introduce MADV_CLR_HUGEPAGE

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Tue 30-05-17 16:04:56, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 12:39:30PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Tue 30-05-17 13:19:22, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> > > On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 09:44:08AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > > On Wed 24-05-17 17:27:36, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> > > > > On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 01:18:00PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > > [...]
> > > > > > Why cannot khugepaged simply skip over all VMAs which have userfault
> > > > > > regions registered? This would sound like a less error prone approach to
> > > > > > me.
> > > > > 
> > > > > khugepaged does skip over VMAs which have userfault. We could register the
> > > > > regions with userfault before populating them to avoid collapses in the
> > > > > transition period.
> > > > 
> > > > Why cannot you register only post-copy regions and "manually" copy the
> > > > pre-copy parts?
> > > 
> > > We can register only post-copy regions, but this will cause VMA
> > > fragmentation. Now we register the entire VMA with userfaultfd, no matter
> > > how many pages were dirtied there since the pre-dump. If we register only
> > > post-copy regions, we will split out the VMAs for those regions.
> > 
> > Is this really a problem, though?
> 
> It would eventually get -ENOMEM or at best create lots of unnecessary
> vmas (at least UFFDIO_COPY would never risk to trigger -ENOMEM).

I sysctl for the mapcount can be increased, right? I also assume that
those vmas will get merged after the post copy is done.

> The only attractive alternative is to use UFFDIO_COPY for precopy too
> after pre-registering the whole range in uffd (which would happen
> later anyway to start postcopy).
> 
> > It would be good to measure that though. You are proposing a new user
> > API and the THP api is quite convoluted already so there better be a
> > very good reason to add a new API. So far I can only see that it would
> > be more convinient to add another madvise command and that is rather
> > insufficient justification IMHO. Also do you expect somebody else would
> > use new madvise? What would be the usecase?
> 
> UFFDIO_COPY while not being a major slowdown for sure, it's likely
> measurable at the microbenchmark level because it would add a
> enter/exit kernel to every 4k memcpy. It's not hard to imagine that as
> measurable. How that impacts the total precopy time I don't know, it
> would need to be benchmarked to be sure.

Yes, please!

> The main benefit of this
> madvise is precisely to skip those enter/exit kernel that UFFDIO_COPY
> would add. Even if the impact on the total precopy time wouldn't be
> measurable (i.e. if it's network bound load), the madvise that allows
> using memcpy after setting VM_NOHUGEPAGE, would free up some CPU
> cycles in the destination that could be used by other processes.

I understand that part but it sounds awfully one purpose thing to me.
Are we going to add other MADVISE_RESET_$FOO to clear other flags just
because we can race in this specific use case?

> About the proposed madvise, it just clear bits, but it doesn't change
> at all how those bits are computed in THP code. So I don't see it as
> convoluted.

But we already have MADV_HUGEPAGE, MADV_NOHUGEPAGE and prctl to
enable/disable thp. Doesn't that sound little bit too much for a single
feature to you?
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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