Re: [LKP] [lkp] [mm] 5c0a85fad9: unixbench.score -6.3% regression

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 5:52 AM, Kirill A. Shutemov
<kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 11, 2016 at 06:02:57PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>>
>> I've timed it at over a thousand cycles on at least some CPU's, but
>> that's still peanuts compared to a real page fault. It shouldn't be
>> *that* noticeable, ie no way it's a 6% regression on its own.
>
> Looks like setting accessed bit is the problem.

Ok. I've definitely seen it as an issue, but never to the point of
several percent on a real benchmark that wasn't explicitly testing
that cost.

I reported the excessive dirty/accessed bit cost to Intel back in the
P4 days, but it's apparently not been high enough for anybody to care.

> We spend 36% more time in page walk only, about 1% of total userspace time.
> Combining this with page walk footprint on caches, I guess we can get to
> this 3.5% score difference I see.
>
> I'm not sure if there's anything we can do to solve the issue without
> screwing relacim logic again. :(

I think we should say "screw the reclaim logic" for now, and revert
commit 5c0a85fad949 for now.

Considering how much trouble the accessed bit is on some other
architectures too, I wonder if we should strive to simply not care
about it, and always leaving it set. And then rely entirely on just
unmapping the pages and making the "we took a page fault after
unmapping" be the real activity tester.

So get rid of the "if the page is young, mark it old but leave it in
the page tables" logic entirely. When we unmap a page, it will always
either be in the swap cache or the page cache anyway, so faulting it
in again should be just a minor fault with no actual IO happening.

That might be less of an impact in the end - yes, the unmap and
re-fault is much more expensive, but it presumably happens to much
fewer pages.

What do you think?

             Linus