Re: [PATCH v1 1/3] mm: Allow deferred splitting of arbitrary large anon folios

[David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>]

On 17.07.23 17:41, Ryan Roberts wrote:
> On 17/07/2023 16:30, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 17, 2023 at 03:31:08PM +0100, Ryan Roberts wrote:
>>> In preparation for the introduction of large folios for anonymous
>>> memory, we would like to be able to split them when they have unmapped
>>> subpages, in order to free those unused pages under memory pressure. So
>>> remove the artificial requirement that the large folio needed to be at
>>> least PMD-sized.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com>
>>> Reviewed-by: Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com>
>>> Reviewed-by: Yin Fengwei <fengwei.yin@intel.com>
>>
>> Reviewed-by: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
> 
> Thanks!
> 
>>
>>>   		 */
>>> -		if (folio_test_pmd_mappable(folio) && folio_test_anon(folio))
>>> +		if (folio_test_large(folio) && folio_test_anon(folio))
>>>   			if (!compound || nr < nr_pmdmapped)
>>>   				deferred_split_folio(folio);
>>
>> I wonder if it's worth introducing a folio_test_deferred_split() (better
>> naming appreciated ...) to allow us to allocate order-1 folios and not
>> do horrible things.  Maybe it's not worth supporting order-1 folios;
>> we're always better off going to order-2 immediately.  Just thinking.
> 
> There is more than just _deferred_list in the 3rd page; you also have _flags_2a
> and _head_2a. I guess you know much better than me what they store. But I'm
> guessing its harder than jsut not splitting an order-1 page?
> 
> With the direction of large anon folios (_not_ retrying with every order down to
> 0), I'm not sure what the use case would be for order-1 anyway?

Just noting that we might need some struct-page space for better 
mapcount/shared tracking, which might get hard for order-1 pages.

-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb