Re: [PATCH 0/4] arm64/mm: contpte-sized exec folios for 16K and 64K pages

["David Hildenbrand (Arm)" <david@kernel.org>]

On 3/18/26 11:52, Usama Arif wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:55:38 -0700 Usama Arif <usama.arif@linux.dev> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:33:42 +0000 Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> This was deliberate, although perhaps a bit conservative. I was concerned about
>>> the possibility of read amplification; pointlessly reading in a load of memory
>>> that never actually gets used. And that is independent of page size.
>>>
>>> 2M seems quite big as a default IMHO, I could imagine Android might complain
>>> about memory pressure in their 16K config, for example.
>>>
>>
>> The force_thp_readahead path in do_sync_mmap_readahead() reads at
>> HPAGE_PMD_ORDER (2M on x86) and even doubles it to 4M for
>> non VM_RAND_READ mappings (ra->size *= 2), with async readahead
>> enabled. exec_folio_order() is more conservative. a single 2M folio
>> with async_size=0, no speculative prefetch. So I think the memory
>> pressure would not be worse than what x86 has?
>>
>> For memory pressure on Android 16K: the readahead is clamped to VMA
>> boundaries, so a small shared library won't read 2M.
>> page_cache_ra_order() reduces folio order near EOF and on allocation
>> failure, so the 2M order is a preference, not a guarantee with the
>> current code?
>>
> 
> I am not a big fan of introducing Kconfig options, but would
> CONFIG_EXEC_FOLIO_ORDER with the default value being 64K be a better
> solution? Or maybe a default of 64K for 4K and 16K base page size,
> but 2M for 64K page size as 64K base page size is mostly for servers.
> 
> Using a default value of 64K would mean no change in behaviour.

I don't think such a tunable is the right approach. We should try to do
something smarter in the kernel.

We should have access to the mapping size and whether there is currently
real memory pressure. We might even know the estimated speed of the
device we're loading data from :)

-- 
Cheers,

David