Re: [RFC 00/11] khugepaged: mTHP support

Nico Pache
2025-01-10T02:28:15Z

On Wed, Jan 8, 2025 at 11:22 PM Dev Jain <dev.jain@arm.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 09/01/25 5:01 am, Nico Pache wrote:
> > The following series provides khugepaged and madvise collapse with the
> > capability to collapse regions to mTHPs.
> >
> > To achieve this we generalize the khugepaged functions to no longer depend
> > on PMD_ORDER. Then during the PMD scan, we keep track of chunks of pages
> > (defined by MTHP_MIN_ORDER) that are fully utilized. This info is tracked
> > using a bitmap. After the PMD scan is done, we do binary recursion on the
> > bitmap to find the optimal mTHP sizes for the PMD range. The restriction
> > on max_ptes_none is removed during the scan, to make sure we account for
> > the whole PMD range. max_ptes_none is mapped to a 0-100 range to
> > determine how full a mTHP order needs to be before collapsing it.
> >
> > Some design choices to note:
> > - bitmap structures are allocated dynamically because on some arch's
> > (like PowerPC) the value of MTHP_BITMAP_SIZE cannot be computed at
> > compile time leading to warnings.
> > - The recursion is masked through a stack structure.
> > - A MTHP_MIN_ORDER was added to compress the bitmap, and ensure it was
> > 64bit on x86. This provides some optimization on the bitmap operations.
> > if other arches/configs that have larger than 512 PTEs per PMD want to
> > compress their bitmap further we can change this value per arch.
> >
> > Patch 1-2: Some refactoring to combine madvise_collapse and khugepaged
> > Patch 3: A minor "fix"/optimization
> > Patch 4: Refactor/rename hpage_collapse
> > Patch 5-7: Generalize khugepaged functions for arbitrary orders
> > Patch 8-11: The mTHP patches
> >
> > This series acts as an alternative to Dev Jain's approach [1]. The two
> > series differ in a few ways:
> > - My approach uses a bitmap to store the state of the linear scan_pmd to
> > then determine potential mTHP batches. Devs incorporates his directly
> > into the scan, and will try each available order.
> > - Dev is attempting to optimize the locking, while my approach keeps the
> > locking changes to a minimum. I believe his changes are not safe for
> > uffd.
> > - Dev's changes only work for khugepaged not madvise_collapse (although
> > i think that was by choice and it could easily support madvise)
> > - Dev scales all khugepaged sysfs tunables by order, while im removing
> > the restriction of max_ptes_none and converting it to a scale to
> > determine a (m)THP threshold.
> > - Dev turns on khugepaged if any order is available while mine still
> > only runs if PMDs are enabled. I like Dev's approach and will most
> > likely do the same in my PATCH posting.
> > - mTHPs need their ref count updated to 1<<order, which Dev is missing.
> >
> > Patch 11 was inspired by one of Dev's changes.
> >
> > [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20241216165105.56185-1-dev.jain@arm.com/
> >
> > Nico Pache (11):
> > introduce khugepaged_collapse_single_pmd to collapse a single pmd
> > khugepaged: refactor madvise_collapse and khugepaged_scan_mm_slot
> > khugepaged: Don't allocate khugepaged mm_slot early
> > khugepaged: rename hpage_collapse_* to khugepaged_*
> > khugepaged: generalize hugepage_vma_revalidate for mTHP support
> > khugepaged: generalize alloc_charge_folio for mTHP support
> > khugepaged: generalize __collapse_huge_page_* for mTHP support
> > khugepaged: introduce khugepaged_scan_bitmap for mTHP support
> > khugepaged: add mTHP support
> > khugepaged: remove max_ptes_none restriction on the pmd scan
> > khugepaged: skip collapsing mTHP to smaller orders
> >
> > include/linux/khugepaged.h | 4 +-
> > mm/huge_memory.c | 3 +-
> > mm/khugepaged.c | 436 +++++++++++++++++++++++++------------
> > 3 files changed, 306 insertions(+), 137 deletions(-)
>
> Before I take a proper look at your series, can you please include any testing
> you may have done?

I Built these changes for the following arches: x86_64, arm64,
arm64-64k, ppc64le, s390x

x86 testing:
- Selftests mm
- some stress-ng tests
- compile kernel
- I did some tests with my defer [1] set on top. This pushes all the
work to khugepaged, which removes the noise of all the PF allocations.

I recently got an ARM64 machine and did some simple sanity tests (on
both 4k and 64k) like selftests, stress-ng, and playing around with
the tunables, etc.

I will also be running all the builds through our CI, and perf testing
environments before posting.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240729222727.64319-1-npache@redhat.com/

>