Re: [PATCH v4 35/36] mm: Convert do_set_pte() to set_pte_range()

[Yin Fengwei <fengwei.yin@intel.com>]

On 3/25/23 01:23, Will Deacon wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 03:11:00PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 02:58:29PM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
>>> Yes, please don't fault everything in as young as it has caused horrible
>>> vmscan behaviour leading to app-startup slowdown in the past:
>>>
>>> https://lore.kernel.org/all/20210111140149.GB7642@willie-the-truck/
>>>
>>> If we have to use the same value for all the ptes, then just base them
>>> all on arch_wants_old_prefaulted_pte() as iirc hardware AF was pretty
>>> cheap in practice for us.
>>
>> I think that's wrong, because this is a different scenario.
>>
>> Before:
>>
>> We faulted in N single-page folios.  Each page/folio is tracked
>> independently.  That's N entries on whatever LRU list it ends up on.
>> The prefaulted ones _should_ be marked old -- they haven't been
>> accessed; we've just decided to put them in the page tables to
>> speed up faultaround.  The unaccessed pages need to fall off the LRU
>> list as quickly as possible; keeping them around only hurts if the
>> workload has no locality of reference.
>>
>> After:
>>
>> We fault in N folios, some possibly consisting of multiple pages.
>> Each folio is tracked separately, but individual pages in the folio
>> are not tracked; they belong to their folio.  In this scenario, if
>> the other PTEs for pages in the same folio are marked as young or old
>> doesn't matter; the entire folio will be tracked as young, because we
>> referenced one of the pages in this folio.  Marking the other PTEs as
>> young actually helps because we don't take pagefaults on them (whether
>> we have a HW or SW accessed bit).
>>
>> (can i just say that i dislike how we mix up our old/young accessed/not
>> terminology here?)
>>
>> We should still mark the PTEs referencing unaccessed folios as old.
>> No argument there, and this patch does that.  But it's fine for all the
>> PTEs referencing the accessed folio to have the young bit, at least as
>> far as I can tell.
> 
> Ok, thanks for the explanation. So as long as
> arch_wants_old_prefaulted_pte() is taken into account for the unaccessed
> folios, then I think we should be good? Unconditionally marking those
> PTEs as old probably hurts x86.
Yes. We do only mark PTEs old for arch_wants_old_prefaulted_pte()
system. Thanks.


Regards
Yin, Fengwei

> 
> Will