Re: [RFC PATCH v2 00/51] 1G page support for guest_memfd

[Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>]

On Fri, May 16, 2025, Vishal Annapurve wrote:
> On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 7:12 PM Edgecombe, Rick P <rick.p.edgecombe@intel.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2025-05-15 at 17:57 -0700, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > > You're conflating two different things.  guest_memfd allocating and managing
> > > 1GiB physical pages, and KVM mapping memory into the guest at 1GiB/2MiB
> > > granularity.  Allocating memory in 1GiB chunks is useful even if KVM can only
> > > map memory into the guest using 4KiB pages.
> >
> > I'm aware of the 1.6% vmemmap benefits from the LPC talk. Is there more? The
> > list quoted there was more about guest performance. Or maybe the clever page
> > table walkers that find contiguous small mappings could benefit guest
> > performance too? It's the kind of thing I'd like to see at least broadly called
> > out.
> 
> The crux of this series really is hugetlb backing support for guest_memfd and
> handling CoCo VMs irrespective of the page size as I suggested earlier, so 2M
> page sizes will need to handle similar complexity of in-place conversion.
> 
> Google internally uses 1G hugetlb pages to achieve high bandwidth IO,

E.g. hitting target networking line rates is only possible with 1GiB mappings,
otherwise TLB pressure gets in the way.

> lower memory footprint using HVO and lower MMU/IOMMU page table memory
> footprint among other improvements. These percentages carry a substantial
> impact when working at the scale of large fleets of hosts each carrying
> significant memory capacity.

Yeah, 1.6% might sound small, but over however many bytes of RAM there are in
the fleet, it's a huge (lol) amount of memory saved.

> > >   Yes, some of this is useful for TDX, but we (and others) want to use
> > > guest_memfd for far more than just CoCo VMs.
> >
> >
> > >  And for non-CoCo VMs, 1GiB hugepages are mandatory for various workloads.
> > I've heard this a lot. It must be true, but I've never seen the actual numbers.
> > For a long time people believed 1GB huge pages on the direct map were critical,
> > but then benchmarking on a contemporary CPU couldn't find much difference
> > between 2MB and 1GB. I'd expect TDP huge pages to be different than that because
> > the combined walks are huge, iTLB, etc, but I'd love to see a real number.

The direct map is very, very different than userspace and thus guest mappings.
Software (hopefully) isn't using the direct map to index multi-TiB databases,
or to transfer GiBs of data over the network.  The amount of memory the kernel
is regularly accessing is an order or two magnitude smaller than single process
use cases.

A few examples from a quick search:

http://pvk.ca/Blog/2014/02/18/how-bad-can-1gb-pages-be
https://www.percona.com/blog/benchmark-postgresql-with-linux-hugepages/