RE: [RFC PATCH v1 00/57] Boot-time page size selection for arm64

Michael Kelley
2024-10-15T18:40:25Z

From: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> Sent: Monday, October 14, 2024 3:55 AM
>
> Hi All,
>
> Patch bomb incoming... This covers many subsystems, so I've included a core set
> of people on the full series and additionally included maintainers on relevant
> patches. I haven't included those maintainers on this cover letter since the
> numbers were far too big for it to work. But I've included a link to this cover
> letter on each patch, so they can hopefully find their way here. For follow up
> submissions I'll break it up by subsystem, but for now thought it was important
> to show the full picture.
>
> This RFC series implements support for boot-time page size selection within the
> arm64 kernel. arm64 supports 3 base page sizes (4K, 16K, 64K), but to date, page
> size has been selected at compile-time, meaning the size is baked into a given
> kernel image. As use of larger-than-4K page sizes become more prevalent this
> starts to present a problem for distributions. Boot-time page size selection
> enables the creation of a single kernel image, which can be told which page size
> to use on the kernel command line.
>
> Why is having an image-per-page size problematic?
> =================================================
>
> Many traditional distros are now supporting both 4K and 64K. And this means
> managing 2 kernel packages, along with drivers for each. For some, it means
> multiple installer flavours and multiple ISOs. All of this adds up to a
> less-than-ideal level of complexity. Additionally, Android now supports 4K and
> 16K kernels. I'm told having to explicitly manage their KABI for each kernel is
> painful, and the extra flash space required for both kernel images and the
> duplicated modules has been problematic. Boot-time page size selection solves
> all of this.
>
> Additionally, in starting to think about the longer term deployment story for
> D128 page tables, which Arm architecture now supports, a lot of the same
> problems need to be solved, so this work sets us up nicely for that.
>
> So what's the down side?
> ========================
>
> Well nothing's free; Various static allocations in the kernel image must be
> sized for the worst case (largest supported page size), so image size is in line
> with size of 64K compile-time image. So if you're interested in 4K or 16K, there
> is a slight increase to the image size. But I expect that problem goes away if
> you're compressing the image - its just some extra zeros. At boot-time, I expect
> we could free the unused static storage once we know the page size - although
> that would be a follow up enhancement.
>
> And then there is performance. Since PAGE_SIZE and friends are no longer
> compile-time constants, we must look up their values and do arithmetic at
> runtime instead of compile-time. My early perf testing suggests this is
> inperceptible for real-world workloads, and only has small impact on
> microbenchmarks - more on this below.

[snip]

This is pretty cool. :-) FWIW, I've built a kernel with this patch set, and
have it running in a RHEL 8.7 guest on Hyper-V in the Azure public cloud.
Ran with 4K, 16K, and 64K page sizes, and the basic smoke tests work.

The Hyper-V specific code in the Linux kernel needed a few tweaks to
deal with PAGE_SIZE and friends no longer being constant, but it's nothing
significant. Getting the kernel built in the first place was a little harder
because my .config file is fairly generic with a lot of device drivers and file
system code that aren't really needed for Hyper-V guests. I had to
weed out the ones that won't build. My RHEL 8.7 install uses LVM, so I
hacked the 'dm' code to make it compile and run.

As this work moves forward, I can supply the necessary patches for
the Hyper-V support. Let me know if you want to include them in the
main patch set.

I've added a couple of Microsoft's Linux people to this email's addressee
list so they are aware of what's going on.

Michael Kelley