Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] mm: use aligned address in clear_gigantic_page()

Kefeng Wang
2024-10-29T13:04:30Z

>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> That should all be cleaned up ... process_huge_page() likely
>>>>>>> shouldn't
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, let's fix the bug firstly,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> be even consuming "nr_pages".
>>>>>>
>>>>>> No sure about this part, it uses nr_pages as the end and calculate
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> 'base'.
>>>>>
>>>>> It should be using folio_nr_pages().
>>>>
>>>> But process_huge_page() without an explicit folio argument, I'd like to
>>>> move the aligned address calculate into the folio_zero_user and
>>>> copy_user_large_folio(will rename it to folio_copy_user()) in the
>>>> following cleanup patches, or do it in the fix patches?
>>>
>>> First, why does folio_zero_user() call process_huge_page() for *a small
>>> folio*? Because we like or code to be extra complicated to understand?
>>> Or am I missing something important?
>>
>> The folio_zero_user() used for PMD-sized THP and HugeTLB before, and
>> after anon mTHP supported, it is used for order-2~order-PMD-order THP
>> and HugeTLB, so it won't process a small folio if I understand correctly.
>
> And unfortunately neither the documentation nor the function name
> expresses that :(
>
> I'm happy to review any patches that improve the situation here :)
>

Actually, could we drop the process_huge_page() totally, from my
testcase[1], process_huge_page() is not better than clear/copy page
from start to last, and sequential clearing/copying maybe more
beneficial to the hardware prefetching, and is there a way to let lkp
to test to check the performance, since the process_huge_page()
was submitted by Ying, what's your opinion?

[1]https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/2524689c-08f5-446c-8cb9-924f9db0ee3a@huawei.com/
case-anon-w-seq-mt (tried 2M PMD THP/ 64K mTHP)
case-anon-w-seq-hugetlb (2M PMD HugeTLB)
fallocate hugetlb 20G (2M PMD HugeTLB)
fallocate tmpfs 20G (2M PMD THP)