Re: [PATCH v2 01/13] mm: support madvise(MADV_FREE)

[Daniel Micay <danielmicay@gmail.com>]

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On 04/11/15 12:53 AM, Daniel Micay wrote:
>> In the common case it will be passed many pages by the allocator. There
>> will still be a layer of purging logic on top of MADV_FREE but it can be
>> much thinner than the current workarounds for MADV_DONTNEED. So the
>> allocator would still be coalescing dirty ranges and only purging when
>> the ratio of dirty:clean pages rises above some threshold. It would be
>> able to weight the largest ranges for purging first rather than logic
>> based on stuff like aging as is used for MADV_DONTNEED.
> 
> I would expect that jemalloc would just start putting the dirty ranges
> into the usual pair of red-black trees (with coalescing) and then doing
> purging starting from the largest spans to get back down below whatever
> dirty:clean ratio it's trying to keep. Right now, it has all lots of
> other logic to deal with this since each MADV_DONTNEED call results in
> lots of zeroing and then page faults.

Er, I mean dirty:active (i.e. ratio of unpurged, dirty pages to ones
that are handed out as allocations, which is kept at something like
1:8). A high constant cost in the madvise call but quick handling of
each page means that allocators need to be more aggressive with purging
more than they strictly need to in one go. For example, it might need to
purge 2M to meet the ratio but it could have a contiguous span of 32M of
dirty pages. If the cost per page is low enough, it could just do the
entire range.


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