Re: [PATCH v4 00/14] Introduce Copy-On-Write to Page Table

Pasha Tatashin
2023-02-14T16:31:06Z

> > The thing with THP is, that during fork(), we always allocate a backup PTE
> > table, to be able to PTE-map the THP whenever we have to. Otherwise we'd
> > have to eventually fail some operations we don't want to fail -- similar to
> > the case where break_cow_pte() could fail now due to -ENOMEM although we
> > really don't want to fail (e.g., change_pte_range() ).
> >
> > I always considered that wasteful, because in many scenarios, we'll never
> > ever split a THP and possibly waste memory.
> >
> > Optimizing that for THP (e.g., don't always allocate backup THP, have some
> > global allocation backup pool for splits + refill when close-to-empty) might
> > provide similar fork() improvements, both in speed and memory consumption
> > when it comes to anonymous memory.
>
> When collapsing huge pages, do/can they reuse those PTEs for backup?
> So, we don't have to allocate the PTE or maintain the pool.

It might not work for all pages, as collapsing pages might have had
holes in the user page table, and there were no PTE tables.
Pasha