Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] Change how we determine when to hand out THPs

[Alex Thorlton <athorlton@sgi.com>]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 05:43:40PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Alex Thorlton <athorlton@sgi.com> wrote:
> >> Please cc Andrea on this.
> >
> > I'm going to clean up a few small things for a v2 pretty soon, I'll be
> > sure to cc Andrea there.
> >
> >> > My proposed solution to the problem is to allow users to set a
> >> > threshold at which THPs will be handed out.  The idea here is that, when
> >> > a user faults in a page in an area where they would usually be handed a
> >> > THP, we pull 512 pages off the free list, as we would with a regular
> >> > THP, but we only fault in single pages from that chunk, until the user
> >> > has faulted in enough pages to pass the threshold we've set.  Once they
> >> > pass the threshold, we do the necessary work to turn our 512 page chunk
> >> > into a proper THP.  As it stands now, if the user tries to fault in
> >> > pages from different nodes, we completely give up on ever turning a
> >> > particular chunk into a THP, and just fault in the 4K pages as they're
> >> > requested.  We may want to make this tunable in the future (i.e. allow
> >> > them to fault in from only 2 different nodes).
> >>
> >> OK.  But all 512 pages reside on the same node, yes?  Whereas with thp
> >> disabled those 512 pages would have resided closer to the CPUs which
> >> instantiated them.
> >
> > As it stands right now, yes, since we're pulling a 512 page contiguous
> > chunk off the free list, everything from that chunk will reside on the
> > same node, but as I (stupidly) forgot to mention in my original e-mail,
> > one piece I have yet to add is the functionality to put the remaining
> > unfaulted pages from our chunk *back* on the free list after we give up
> > on handing out a THP.  Once this is in there, things will behave more
> > like they do when THP is turned completely off, i.e. pages will get
> > faulted in closer to the CPU that first referenced them once we give up
> > on handing out the THP.
> 
> This sounds like it's almost the worst possible behavior wrt avoiding
> memory fragmentation.  If userspace mmaps a very large region and then
> starts accessing it randomly, it will allocate a bunch of contiguous
> 512-page regions, claim one page from each, and return the other 511
> pages to the free list.  Memory is now maximally fragmented from the
> point of view of future THP allocations.

Maybe I'm missing the point here to some degree, but the way I think
about this is that if we trigger the behavior to return the pages to the
free list, we don't *want* future THP allocations in that range of
memory for the current process anyways.  So, having the memory be
fragmented from the point of view of future THP allocations isn't an
issue.  

- Alex

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