From: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
To: Nitesh Narayan Lal <nitesh@redhat.com>,
Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@gmail.com>,
kvm@vger.kernel.org, mst@redhat.com, dave.hansen@intel.com,
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
akpm@linux-foundation.org
Cc: yang.zhang.wz@gmail.com, pagupta@redhat.com, riel@surriel.com,
konrad.wilk@oracle.com, lcapitulino@redhat.com,
wei.w.wang@intel.com, aarcange@redhat.com, pbonzini@redhat.com,
dan.j.williams@intel.com, alexander.h.duyck@linux.intel.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] mm / virtio: Provide support for page hinting
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 20:41:33 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <f7578309-dd36-bda0-6a30-34a6df21faca@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <0c520470-4654-cdf2-cf4d-d7c351d25e8b@redhat.com>
On 24.07.19 20:40, Nitesh Narayan Lal wrote:
>
> On 7/24/19 12:54 PM, Alexander Duyck wrote:
>> This series provides an asynchronous means of hinting to a hypervisor
>> that a guest page is no longer in use and can have the data associated
>> with it dropped. To do this I have implemented functionality that allows
>> for what I am referring to as page hinting
>>
>> The functionality for this is fairly simple. When enabled it will allocate
>> statistics to track the number of hinted pages in a given free area. When
>> the number of free pages exceeds this value plus a high water value,
>> currently 32,
> Shouldn't we configure this to a lower number such as 16?
>> it will begin performing page hinting which consists of
>> pulling pages off of free list and placing them into a scatter list. The
>> scatterlist is then given to the page hinting device and it will perform
>> the required action to make the pages "hinted", in the case of
>> virtio-balloon this results in the pages being madvised as MADV_DONTNEED
>> and as such they are forced out of the guest. After this they are placed
>> back on the free list, and an additional bit is added if they are not
>> merged indicating that they are a hinted buddy page instead of a standard
>> buddy page. The cycle then repeats with additional non-hinted pages being
>> pulled until the free areas all consist of hinted pages.
>>
>> I am leaving a number of things hard-coded such as limiting the lowest
>> order processed to PAGEBLOCK_ORDER,
> Have you considered making this option configurable at the compile time?
>> and have left it up to the guest to
>> determine what the limit is on how many pages it wants to allocate to
>> process the hints.
> It might make sense to set the number of pages to be hinted at a time from the
> hypervisor.
>>
>> My primary testing has just been to verify the memory is being freed after
>> allocation by running memhog 79g on a 80g guest and watching the total
>> free memory via /proc/meminfo on the host. With this I have verified most
>> of the memory is freed after each iteration. As far as performance I have
>> been mainly focusing on the will-it-scale/page_fault1 test running with
>> 16 vcpus. With that I have seen at most a 2% difference between the base
>> kernel without these patches and the patches with virtio-balloon disabled.
>> With the patches and virtio-balloon enabled with hinting the results
>> largely depend on the host kernel. On a 3.10 RHEL kernel I saw up to a 2%
>> drop in performance as I approached 16 threads,
> I think this is acceptable.
>> however on the the lastest
>> linux-next kernel I saw roughly a 4% to 5% improvement in performance for
>> all tests with 8 or more threads.
> Do you mean that with your patches the will-it-scale/page_fault1 numbers were
> better by 4-5% over an unmodified kernel?
>> I believe the difference seen is due to
>> the overhead for faulting pages back into the guest and zeroing of memory.
> It may also make sense to test these patches with netperf to observe how much
> performance drop it is introducing.
>> Patch 4 is a bit on the large side at about 600 lines of change, however
>> I really didn't see a good way to break it up since each piece feeds into
>> the next. So I couldn't add the statistics by themselves as it didn't
>> really make sense to add them without something that will either read or
>> increment/decrement them, or add the Hinted state without something that
>> would set/unset it. As such I just ended up adding the entire thing as
>> one patch. It makes it a bit bigger but avoids the issues in the previous
>> set where I was referencing things before they had been added.
>>
>> Changes from the RFC:
>> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190530215223.13974.22445.stgit@localhost.localdomain/
>> Moved aeration requested flag out of aerator and into zone->flags.
>> Moved bounary out of free_area and into local variables for aeration.
>> Moved aeration cycle out of interrupt and into workqueue.
>> Left nr_free as total pages instead of splitting it between raw and aerated.
>> Combined size and physical address values in virtio ring into one 64b value.
>>
>> Changes from v1:
>> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190619222922.1231.27432.stgit@localhost.localdomain/
>> Dropped "waste page treatment" in favor of "page hinting"
> We may still have to try and find a better name for virtio-balloon side changes.
> As "FREE_PAGE_HINT" and "PAGE_HINTING" are still confusing.
We should have named that free page reporting, but that train already
has left.
--
Thanks,
David / dhildenb
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-07-24 18:41 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 68+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-07-24 16:54 [PATCH v2 0/5] mm / virtio: Provide support for page hinting Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 16:56 ` [PATCH v2 1/5] mm: Adjust shuffle code to allow for future coalescing Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 16:58 ` [PATCH v2 2/5] mm: Move set/get_pcppage_migratetype to mmzone.h Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 17:00 ` [PATCH v2 3/5] mm: Use zone and order instead of free area in free_list manipulators Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 17:03 ` [PATCH v2 4/5] mm: Introduce Hinted pages Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 8:53 ` David Hildenbrand
2019-07-25 11:46 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-25 11:54 ` David Hildenbrand
2019-07-25 15:59 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 16:48 ` David Hildenbrand
2019-07-25 17:38 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 18:32 ` David Hildenbrand
2019-07-25 20:37 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 20:44 ` David Hildenbrand
2019-07-26 12:24 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-26 16:38 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 17:05 ` [PATCH v2 5/5] virtio-balloon: Add support for providing page hints to host Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 19:02 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 19:07 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-24 19:26 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 20:37 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 20:43 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-25 14:44 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-25 14:54 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-25 14:56 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 14:59 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-25 17:42 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-25 19:54 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 17:12 ` [PATCH v2 QEMU] virtio-balloon: Provide a interface for "bubble hinting" Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 19:02 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 20:18 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 20:29 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-24 20:42 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-29 16:58 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-29 19:25 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-29 20:21 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-29 20:49 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-29 21:37 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-29 22:11 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 20:46 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 21:14 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 11:57 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-25 14:57 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 21:38 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 22:03 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 22:08 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 22:27 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 6:07 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-25 11:35 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-25 15:05 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 15:16 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-25 16:16 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 17:19 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-25 18:25 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-25 20:00 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 20:14 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-24 18:40 ` [PATCH v2 0/5] mm / virtio: Provide support for page hinting Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-24 18:41 ` David Hildenbrand [this message]
2019-07-24 19:31 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 19:47 ` David Hildenbrand
2019-07-24 19:54 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-24 21:32 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 19:24 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2019-07-24 20:27 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-24 20:38 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-24 21:00 ` Alexander Duyck
2019-07-25 12:08 ` Nitesh Narayan Lal
2019-07-24 20:38 ` Michael S. Tsirkin
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