Re: missing madvise functionality

Andrew Morton
2007-04-05T21:07:23Z

On Thu, 05 Apr 2007 14:38:30 -0400
Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> wrote:

> Nick Piggin wrote:
>
> > Oh, also: something like this patch would help out MADV_DONTNEED, as it
> > means it can run concurrently with page faults. I think the locking will
> > work (but needs forward porting).
>
> Ironically, your patch decreases throughput on my quad core
> test system, with Jakub's test case.
>
> MADV_DONTNEED, my patch, 10000 loops (14k context switches/second)
>
> real 0m34.890s
> user 0m17.256s
> sys 0m29.797s
>
>
> MADV_DONTNEED, my patch & your patch, 10000 loops (50 context
> switches/second)
>
> real 1m8.321s
> user 0m20.840s
> sys 1m55.677s
>
> I suspect it's moving the contention onto the page table lock,
> in zap_pte_range(). I guess that the thread private memory
> areas must be living right next to each other, in the same
> page table lock regions :)

Remember that we have two different ways of doing that locking:

#if NR_CPUS >= CONFIG_SPLIT_PTLOCK_CPUS
/*
* We tuck a spinlock to guard each pagetable page into its struct page,
* at page->private, with BUILD_BUG_ON to make sure that this will not
* overflow into the next struct page (as it might with DEBUG_SPINLOCK).
* When freeing, reset page->mapping so free_pages_check won't complain.
*/
#define __pte_lockptr(page) &((page)->ptl)
#define pte_lock_init(_page) do { \
spin_lock_init(__pte_lockptr(_page)); \
} while (0)
#define pte_lock_deinit(page) ((page)->mapping = NULL)
#define pte_lockptr(mm, pmd) ({(void)(mm); __pte_lockptr(pmd_page(*(pmd)));})
#else
/*
* We use mm->page_table_lock to guard all pagetable pages of the mm.
*/
#define pte_lock_init(page) do {} while (0)
#define pte_lock_deinit(page) do {} while (0)
#define pte_lockptr(mm, pmd) ({(void)(pmd); &(mm)->page_table_lock;})
#endif /* NR_CPUS < CONFIG_SPLIT_PTLOCK_CPUS */

I wonder which way you're using, and whether using the other way changes
things.

> For more real world workloads, like the MySQL sysbench one,
> I still suspect that your patch would improve things.
>
> Time to move back to debugging other stuff, though.
>
> Andrew, it would be nice if our patches could cook in -mm
> for a while. Want me to change anything before submitting?

umm. I took a quick squint at a patch from you this morning and it looked
OK to me. Please send the finalish thing when it is fully baked and
performance-tested in the various regions of operation, thanks.