Re: [mm] 4e2c82a409: ltp.overcommit_memory01.fail

[Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>]

On Sun, Jul 05, 2020 at 11:52:32AM -0400, Qian Cai wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 05, 2020 at 08:58:54PM +0800, Feng Tang wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 05, 2020 at 08:15:03AM -0400, Qian Cai wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > > On Jul 5, 2020, at 12:45 AM, Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > I did reproduce the problem, and from the debugging, this should
> > > > be the same root cause as lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200526181459.GD991@lca.pw/
> > > > that loosing the batch cause some accuracy problem, and the solution of
> > > > adding some sync is still needed, which is dicussed in
> > > 
> > > Well, before taking any of those patches now to fix the regression,
> > > we will need some performance data first. If it turned out the
> > > original performance gain is no longer relevant anymore due to this
> > > regression fix on top, it is best to drop this patchset and restore
> > > that VM_WARN_ONCE, so you can retry later once you found a better
> > > way to optimize.
> > 
> > The fix of adding sync only happens when the memory policy is being
> > changed to OVERCOMMIT_NEVER, which is not a frequent operation in
> > normal cases.
> > 
> > For the performance improvment data both in commit log and 0day report
> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200622132548.GS5535@shao2-debian/
> > it is for the will-it-scale's mmap testcase, which will not runtime
> > change memory overcommit policy, so the data should be still valid
> > with this fix.
> 
> Well, I would expect people are perfectly reasonable to use
> OVERCOMMIT_NEVER for some workloads making it more frequent operations.

In my last email, I was not saying OVERCOMMIT_NEVER is not a normal case,
but I don't think user will too frequently runtime change the overcommit
policy. And the fix patch of syncing 'vm_committed_as' is only called when
user calls 'sysctl -w vm.overcommit_memory=2'.

> The question is now if any of those regression fixes would now regress
> performance of OVERCOMMIT_NEVER workloads or just in-par with the data
> before the patchset?

For the original patchset, it keeps vm_committed_as unchanged for
OVERCOMMIT_NEVER policy and enlarge it for the other 2 loose policies
OVERCOMMIT_ALWAYS and OVERCOMMIT_GUESS, and I don't expect the "OVERCOMMIT_NEVER
workloads" performance  will be impacted. If you have suggetions for this
kind of benchmarks, I can test them to better verify the patchset, thanks!

- Feng

> 
> Given now this patchset has had so much churn recently, I would think
> "should be still valid" is not really the answer we are looking for.
> 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Feng
> > 
> >