Re: [RFC PATCH] mm: hold PTL from the first PTE while reclaiming a large folio

Barry Song
2024-03-05T09:08:49Z

On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 9:54 PM Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/03/2024 21:57, Barry Song wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 1:21 AM Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi Barry,
> >>
> >> On 04/03/2024 10:37, Barry Song wrote:
> >>> From: Barry Song <v-songbaohua@oppo.com>
> >>>
> >>> page_vma_mapped_walk() within try_to_unmap_one() races with other
> >>> PTEs modification such as break-before-make, while iterating PTEs
> >>> of a large folio, it will only begin to acquire PTL after it gets
> >>> a valid(present) PTE. break-before-make intermediately sets PTEs
> >>> to pte_none. Thus, a large folio's PTEs might be partially skipped
> >>> in try_to_unmap_one().
> >>
> >> I just want to check my understanding here - I think the problem occurs for
> >> PTE-mapped, PMD-sized folios as well as smaller-than-PMD-size large folios? Now
> >> that I've had a look at the code and have a better understanding, I think that
> >> must be the case? And therefore this problem exists independently of my work to
> >> support swap-out of mTHP? (From your previous report I was under the impression
> >> that it only affected mTHP).
> >
> > I think this affects all large folios with PTEs entries more than 1. but hugeTLB
> > is handled as a whole in try_to_unmap_one and its rmap is removed all
> > together, i feel hugeTLB doesn't have this problem.
> >
> >>
> >> Its just that the problem is becoming more pronounced because with mTHP,
> >> PTE-mapped large folios are much more common?
> >
> > right. as now large folios become a more common case, and it is my case
> > running in millions of phones.
> >
> > BTW, I feel we can somehow learn from hugeTLB, for example, we can reclaim
> > all PTEs all together rather than iterating PTEs one by one. This will improve
> > performance. for example, a batched
> > set_ptes_to_swap_entries()
> > {
> > }
> > then we only need to loop once for a large folio, right now we are looping
> > nr_pages times.
>
> You still need a pte-pte loop somewhere. In hugetlb's case it's in the arch
> implementation. HugeTLB ptes are all a fixed size for a given VMA, which makes
> things a bit easier too, whereas in the regular mm, they are now a variable size.
>
> David and I introduced folio_pte_batch() to help gather batches of ptes, and it
> uses the contpte bit to avoid iterating over intermediate ptes. And I'm adding
> swap_pte_batch() which does a similar thing for swap entry batching in v4 of my
> swap-out series.
>
> For your set_ptes_to_swap_entries() example, I'm not sure what it would do other
> than loop over the PTEs setting an incremented swap entry to each one? How is
> that more performant?

right now, while (page_vma_mapped_walk(&pvmw)) will loop nr_pages for each
PTE, if each PTE, we do lots of checks within the loop.

by implementing set_ptes_to_swap_entries(), we can iterate once for
page_vma_mapped_walk(), after folio_pte_batch() has confirmed
the large folio is completely mapped, we set nr_pages swap entries
all together.

we are replacing

for(i=0;i<nr_pages;i++) /* page_vma_mapped_walk */
{
lots of checks;
clear PTEn
set PTEn to swap
}

by

if (large folio && folio_pte_batch() == nr_pages)
set_ptes_to_swap_entries().

>

Thanks,
Ryan