Re: [RFC] mm, THP: Map read-only text segments using large THP pages

[Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>]

On Mon, 14 May 2018, William Kucharski wrote:

> The idea is that the kernel will attempt to allocate and map the range using a
> PMD sized THP page upon first fault; if the allocation is successful the page
> will be populated (at present using a call to kernel_read()) and the page will
> be mapped at the PMD level. If memory allocation fails, the page fault routines
> will drop through to the conventional PAGESIZE-oriented routines for mapping
> the faulting page.

Cool. This could be controlled by the faultaround logic right? If we get
fault_around_bytes up to huge page size then it is reasonable to use a
huge page direcly.

fault_around_bytes can be set via sysfs so there is a natural way to
control this feature there I think.


> Since this approach will map a PMD size block of the memory map at a time, we
> should see a slight uptick in time spent in disk I/O but a substantial drop in
> page faults as well as a reduction in iTLB misses as address ranges will be
> mapped with the larger page. Analysis of a test program that consists of a very
> large text area (483,138,032 bytes in size) that thrashes D$ and I$ shows this
> does occur and there is a slight reduction in program execution time.

I think we would also want such a feature for regular writable pages as
soon as possible.