Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] mm: speed up mremap by 500x on large regions

Joel Fernandes
2018-10-12T12:50:46Z

On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 02:30:56PM +0300, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 06:37:56PM -0700, Joel Fernandes (Google) wrote:
> > Android needs to mremap large regions of memory during memory management
> > related operations. The mremap system call can be really slow if THP is
> > not enabled. The bottleneck is move_page_tables, which is copying each
> > pte at a time, and can be really slow across a large map. Turning on THP
> > may not be a viable option, and is not for us. This patch speeds up the
> > performance for non-THP system by copying at the PMD level when possible.
> >
> > The speed up is three orders of magnitude. On a 1GB mremap, the mremap
> > completion times drops from 160-250 millesconds to 380-400 microseconds.
> >
> > Before:
> > Total mremap time for 1GB data: 242321014 nanoseconds.
> > Total mremap time for 1GB data: 196842467 nanoseconds.
> > Total mremap time for 1GB data: 167051162 nanoseconds.
> >
> > After:
> > Total mremap time for 1GB data: 385781 nanoseconds.
> > Total mremap time for 1GB data: 388959 nanoseconds.
> > Total mremap time for 1GB data: 402813 nanoseconds.
> >
> > Incase THP is enabled, the optimization is skipped. I also flush the
> > tlb every time we do this optimization since I couldn't find a way to
> > determine if the low-level PTEs are dirty. It is seen that the cost of
> > doing so is not much compared the improvement, on both x86-64 and arm64.
>
> I looked into the code more and noticed move_pte() helper called from
> move_ptes(). It changes PTE entry to suite new address.
>
> It is only defined in non-trivial way on Sparc. I don't know much about
> Sparc and it's hard for me to say if the optimization will break anything
> there.

Sparc's move_pte seems to be flushing the D-cache to prevent aliasing. It is
not modifying the PTE itself AFAICS:

#ifdef DCACHE_ALIASING_POSSIBLE
#define __HAVE_ARCH_MOVE_PTE
#define move_pte(pte, prot, old_addr, new_addr) \
({ \
pte_t newpte = (pte); \
if (tlb_type != hypervisor && pte_present(pte)) { \
unsigned long this_pfn = pte_pfn(pte); \
\
if (pfn_valid(this_pfn) && \
(((old_addr) ^ (new_addr)) & (1 << 13))) \
flush_dcache_page_all(current->mm, \
pfn_to_page(this_pfn)); \
} \
newpte; \
})
#endif

If its an issue, then how do transparent huge pages work on Sparc? I don't
see the huge page code (move_huge_pages) during mremap doing anything special
for Sparc architecture when moving PMDs..

Also, do we not flush the caches from any path when we munmap address space?
We do call do_munmap on the old mapping from mremap after moving to the new one.

thanks,

- Joel