Re: [PATCH] thp: reduce usage of huge zero page's atomic counter

[Anshuman Khandual <khandual@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On 08/29/2016 12:01 PM, Aaron Lu wrote:
> The global zero page is used to satisfy an anonymous read fault. If
> THP(Transparent HugePage) is enabled then the global huge zero page is used.
> The global huge zero page uses an atomic counter for reference counting
> and is allocated/freed dynamically according to its counter value.
> 
> CPU time spent on that counter will greatly increase if there are
> a lot of processes doing anonymous read faults. This patch proposes a
> way to reduce the access to the global counter so that the CPU load
> can be reduced accordingly.
> 
> To do this, a new flag of the mm_struct is introduced: MMF_USED_HUGE_ZERO_PAGE.
> With this flag, the process only need to touch the global counter in
> two cases:
> 1 The first time it uses the global huge zero page;
> 2 The time when mm_user of its mm_struct reaches zero.
> 
> Note that right now, the huge zero page is eligible to be freed as soon
> as its last use goes away.  With this patch, the page will not be
> eligible to be freed until the exit of the last process from which it
> was ever used.
> 
> And with the use of mm_user, the kthread is not eligible to use huge
> zero page either. Since no kthread is using huge zero page today, there
> is no difference after applying this patch. But if that is not desired,
> I can change it to when mm_count reaches zero.
> 
> Case used for test on Haswell EP:
> usemem -n 72 --readonly -j 0x200000 100G

Is this benchmark publicly available ? Does not seem to be this one
https://github.com/gnubert/usemem.git, Does it ?


--
To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in
the body to majordomo@kvack.org.  For more info on Linux MM,
see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ .
Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@kvack.org"> email@kvack.org </a>