Re: [RFC PATCH v4 00/13] ktask: multithread CPU-intensive kernel work

Zi Yan
2018-11-06T02:48:56Z

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On 5 Nov 2018, at 21:20, Daniel Jordan wrote:

> Hi Zi,
>
> On Mon, Nov 05, 2018 at 01:49:14PM -0500, Zi Yan wrote:
>> On 5 Nov 2018, at 11:55, Daniel Jordan wrote:
>>
>> Do you think if it makes sense to use ktask for huge page migration (the data
>> copy part)?
>
> It certainly could.
>
>> I did some experiments back in 2016[1], which showed that migrating one 2MB page
>> with 8 threads could achieve 2.8x throughput of the existing single-threaded method.
>> The problem with my parallel page migration patchset at that time was that it
>> has no CPU-utilization awareness, which is solved by your patches now.
>
> Did you run with fewer than 8 threads? I'd want a bigger speedup than 2.8x for
> 8, and a smaller thread count might improve thread utilization.

Yes. When migrating one 2MB THP with migrate_pages() system call on a two-socket server
with 2 E5-2650 v3 CPUs (10 cores per socket) across two sockets, here are the page migration
throughput numbers:

throughput factor
1 thread 2.15 GB/s 1x
2 threads 3.05 GB/s 1.42x
4 threads 4.50 GB/s 2.09x
8 threads 5.98 GB/s 2.78x

>
> It would be nice to multithread at a higher granularity than 2M, too: a range
> of THPs might also perform better than a single page.

Sure. But the kernel currently does not copy multiple pages altogether even if a range
of THPs is migrated. Page copy function is interleaved with page table operations
for every single page.

I also did some study and modified the kernel to improve this, which I called
concurrent page migration in https://lwn.net/Articles/714991/. It further
improves page migration throughput.

—
Best Regards,
Yan Zi

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