Re: [PATCH] mm: allow a controlled amount of unfairness in the page lock

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 10:14:20AM +0000, Maximilian Heyne wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 27, 2023 at 10:54:03AM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 06:16:42AM +0000, Maximilian Heyne wrote:
> > > From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
> > >
> > > [ upstream commit 5ef64cc8987a9211d3f3667331ba3411a94ddc79 ]
> > >
> > > Commit 2a9127fcf229 ("mm: rewrite wait_on_page_bit_common() logic") made
> > > the page locking entirely fair, in that if a waiter came in while the
> > > lock was held, the lock would be transferred to the lockers strictly in
> > > order.
> > >
> > > That was intended to finally get rid of the long-reported watchdog
> > > failures that involved the page lock under extreme load, where a process
> > > could end up waiting essentially forever, as other page lockers stole
> > > the lock from under it.
> > >
> > > It also improved some benchmarks, but it ended up causing huge
> > > performance regressions on others, simply because fair lock behavior
> > > doesn't end up giving out the lock as aggressively, causing better
> > > worst-case latency, but potentially much worse average latencies and
> > > throughput.
> > >
> > > Instead of reverting that change entirely, this introduces a controlled
> > > amount of unfairness, with a sysctl knob to tune it if somebody needs
> > > to.  But the default value should hopefully be good for any normal load,
> > > allowing a few rounds of lock stealing, but enforcing the strict
> > > ordering before the lock has been stolen too many times.
> > >
> > > There is also a hint from Matthieu Baerts that the fair page coloring
> > > may end up exposing an ABBA deadlock that is hidden by the usual
> > > optimistic lock stealing, and while the unfairness doesn't fix the
> > > fundamental issue (and I'm still looking at that), it avoids it in
> > > practice.
> > >
> > > The amount of unfairness can be modified by writing a new value to the
> > > 'sysctl_page_lock_unfairness' variable (default value of 5, exposed
> > > through /proc/sys/vm/page_lock_unfairness), but that is hopefully
> > > something we'd use mainly for debugging rather than being necessary for
> > > any deep system tuning.
> > >
> > > This whole issue has exposed just how critical the page lock can be, and
> > > how contended it gets under certain locks.  And the main contention
> > > doesn't really seem to be anything related to IO (which was the origin
> > > of this lock), but for things like just verifying that the page file
> > > mapping is stable while faulting in the page into a page table.
> > >
> > > Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/ed8442fd-6f54-dd84-cd4a-941e8b7ee603@MichaelLarabel.com/
> > > Link: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-50-59&num=1
> > > Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/c560a38d-8313-51fb-b1ec-e904bd8836bc@tessares.net/
> > > Reported-and-tested-by: Michael Larabel <Michael@michaellarabel.com>
> > > Tested-by: Matthieu Baerts <matthieu.baerts@tessares.net>
> > > Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
> > > Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
> > > Cc: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com>
> > > Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
> > > Cc: Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
> > > Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
> > > CC: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # 5.4
> > > [ mheyne: fixed contextual conflict in mm/filemap.c due to missing
> > >   commit c7510ab2cf5c ("mm: abstract out wake_page_match() from
> > >   wake_page_function()"). Added WQ_FLAG_CUSTOM due to missing commit
> > >   7f26482a872c ("locking/percpu-rwsem: Remove the embedded rwsem") ]
> > > Signed-off-by: Maximilian Heyne <mheyne@amazon.de>
> > > ---
> > >  include/linux/mm.h   |   2 +
> > >  include/linux/wait.h |   2 +
> > >  kernel/sysctl.c      |   8 +++
> > >  mm/filemap.c         | 160 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
> > >  4 files changed, 141 insertions(+), 31 deletions(-)
> > 
> > This was also backported here:
> >         https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230821222547.483583-1-saeed.mirzamohammadi@oracle.com
> > before yours.
> > 
> > I took that one, can you verify that it is identical to yours and works
> > properly as well?
> 
> Yes it's identical and fixes the performance regression seen. Therefore,
> 
>   Tested-by: Maximilian Heyne <mheyne@amazon.de>
> 
> for the other patch.

Thanks, I've added this to the patch now.

greg k-h