Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: Enable khugepaged to operate on non-writable VMAs

David Hildenbrand
2025-09-03T06:52:46Z

On 03.09.25 07:46, Dev Jain wrote:
> Currently khugepaged does not collapse a region which does not have a
> single writable page. This is wasteful since non-writable VMAs mapped by
> the application won't benefit from THP collapse. Therefore, remove this
> restriction and allow khugepaged to collapse a VMA with arbitrary
> protections.
>
> Along with this, currently MADV_COLLAPSE does not perform a collapse on a
> non-writable VMA, and this restriction is nowhere to be found on the
> manpage - the restriction itself sounds wrong to me since the user knows
> the protection of the memory it has mapped, so collapsing read-only
> memory via madvise() should be a choice of the user which shouldn't
> be overriden by the kernel.
>
> On an arm64 machine, an average of 5% improvement is seen on some mmtests
> benchmarks, particularly hackbench, with a maximum improvement of 12%.
>
> Signed-off-by: Dev Jain <dev.jain@arm.com>
> ---

Acked-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>

--
Cheers

David / dhildenb