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

[Alex Thorlton <athorlton@sgi.com>]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 03:29:06PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 11:12:15AM -0600, Alex Thorlton 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. 
> 
> You don't necessarily have to take it off in the
> first place either. Heavy handed approach is to create
> MIGRATE_MOVABLE_THP_RESERVATION_BECAUSE_WHO_NEEDS_SNAPPY_NAMES and put it
> at the bottom of the fallback lists in the page allocator. Allocate one
> base page, move the other 511 to that list. On the second fault, use the
> correctly aligned page if it's still on the buddy lists and local to the
> current NUMA node, otherwise fallback to a normal allocation. On promotion,
> you're checking first if all the faulted page are on the same node and
> second if the correctly aligned pages are on the free lists or not.
> 
> The addition of a migrate type would very heavy handed but you could
> just create a special cased linked list of pages that are potentially
> reserved that is drained before the page allocator wakes kswapd.
> 
> Order the pages such that the oldest one on the new free list is the
> first allocated. That way you do not have to worry about scanning tasks
> for pages to put back on the free list.

Thanks for the input, Mel.  While I agree that the addition of a migrate
type might be a bit heavy handed, I think that would also get rid of the
problem that Kirill pointed out with forking processes, i.e. the current
behavior tracks temporary huge pages in a per-mm freelist, which falls
apart for forked processes (only useful in the threaded case).  I'll
take a look into this soon.

- Alex

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