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From: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
To: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>, Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>,
	Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>,
	Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>,
	linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>, Jason Evans <je@fb.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC 0/6] mm: support madvise(MADV_FREE)
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 10:55:24 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <5328888C.7030402@mit.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1394779070-8545-1-git-send-email-minchan@kernel.org>

On 03/13/2014 11:37 PM, Minchan Kim wrote:
> This patch is an attempt to support MADV_FREE for Linux.
> 
> Rationale is following as.
> 
> Allocators call munmap(2) when user call free(3) if ptr is
> in mmaped area. But munmap isn't cheap because it have to clean up
> all pte entries, unlinking a vma and returns free pages to buddy
> so overhead would be increased linearly by mmaped area's size.
> So they like madvise_dontneed rather than munmap.
> 
> "dontneed" holds read-side lock of mmap_sem so other threads
> of the process could go with concurrent page faults so it is
> better than munmap if it's not lack of address space.
> But the problem is that most of allocator reuses that address
> space soonish so applications see page fault, page allocation,
> page zeroing if allocator already called madvise_dontneed
> on the address space.
> 
> For avoidng that overheads, other OS have supported MADV_FREE.
> The idea is just mark pages as lazyfree when madvise called
> and purge them if memory pressure happens. Otherwise, VM doesn't
> detach pages on the address space so application could use
> that memory space without above overheads.

I must be missing something.

If the application issues MADV_FREE and then writes to the MADV_FREEd
range, the kernel needs to know that the pages are no longer safe to
lazily free.  This would presumably happen via a page fault on write.
For that to happen reliably, the kernel has to write protect the pages
when MADV_FREE is called, which in turn requires flushing the TLBs.

How does this end up being faster than munmap?

--Andy

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2014-03-18 17:55 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2014-03-14  6:37 [RFC 0/6] mm: support madvise(MADV_FREE) Minchan Kim
2014-03-14  6:37 ` [RFC 1/6] mm: clean up PAGE_MAPPING_FLAGS Minchan Kim
2014-03-14  6:37 ` [RFC 2/6] mm: work deactivate_page with anon pages Minchan Kim
2014-03-14  6:37 ` [RFC 3/6] mm: support madvise(MADV_FREE) Minchan Kim
2014-03-14  7:49   ` Minchan Kim
2014-03-14 13:33   ` Kirill A. Shutemov
2014-03-14 15:24     ` Minchan Kim
2014-03-18 18:26   ` Johannes Weiner
2014-03-19  1:22     ` Minchan Kim
2014-03-14  6:37 ` [RFC 4/6] mm: add stat about lazyfree pages Minchan Kim
2014-03-14  6:37 ` [RFC 5/6] mm: reclaim lazyfree pages in swapless system Minchan Kim
2014-03-14  6:37 ` [RFC 6/6] mm: ksm: don't merge lazyfree page Minchan Kim
2014-03-14  7:37 ` [RFC 0/6] mm: support madvise(MADV_FREE) Zhang Yanfei
2014-03-14  7:56   ` Minchan Kim
2014-03-18 17:55 ` Andy Lutomirski [this message]
2014-03-19  0:18   ` Minchan Kim
2014-03-19  0:23     ` Andy Lutomirski
2014-03-19  1:02       ` Minchan Kim
2014-03-19  5:15       ` Johannes Weiner

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