Re: [PATCH] hugetlb: Do not account hugetlb pages as NR_FILE_PAGES

Mel Gorman
2015-05-22T14:36:08Z

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 04:21:43PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Thu 21-05-15 13:09:09, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> > On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 03:27:22PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > hugetlb pages uses add_to_page_cache to track shared mappings. This
> > > is OK from the data structure point of view but it is less so from the
> > > NR_FILE_PAGES accounting:
> > > - huge pages are accounted as 4k which is clearly wrong
> > > - this counter is used as the amount of the reclaimable page
> > > cache which is incorrect as well because hugetlb pages are
> > > special and not reclaimable
> > > - the counter is then exported to userspace via /proc/meminfo
> > > (in Cached:), /proc/vmstat and /proc/zoneinfo as
> > > nr_file_pages which is confusing at least:
> > > Cached: 8883504 kB
> > > HugePages_Free: 8348
> > > ...
> > > Cached: 8916048 kB
> > > HugePages_Free: 156
> > > ...
> > > thats 8192 huge pages allocated which is ~16G accounted as 32M
> > >
> > > There are usually not that many huge pages in the system for this to
> > > make any visible difference e.g. by fooling __vm_enough_memory or
> > > zone_pagecache_reclaimable.
> > >
> > > Fix this by special casing huge pages in both __delete_from_page_cache
> > > and __add_to_page_cache_locked. replace_page_cache_page is currently
> > > only used by fuse and that shouldn't touch hugetlb pages AFAICS but it
> > > is more robust to check for special casing there as well.
> > >
> > > Hugetlb pages shouldn't get to any other paths where we do accounting:
> > > - migration - we have a special handling via
> > > hugetlbfs_migrate_page
> > > - shmem - doesn't handle hugetlb pages directly even for
> > > SHM_HUGETLB resp. MAP_HUGETLB
> > > - swapcache - hugetlb is not swapable
> > >
> > > This has a user visible effect but I believe it is reasonable because
> > > the previously exported number is simply bogus.
> > >
> > > An alternative would be to account hugetlb pages with their real size
> > > and treat them similar to shmem. But this has some drawbacks.
> > >
> > > First we would have to special case in kernel users of NR_FILE_PAGES and
> > > considering how hugetlb is special we would have to do it everywhere. We
> > > do not want Cached exported by /proc/meminfo to include it because the
> > > value would be even more misleading.
> > > __vm_enough_memory and zone_pagecache_reclaimable would have to do
> > > the same thing because those pages are simply not reclaimable. The
> > > correction is even not trivial because we would have to consider all
> > > active hugetlb page sizes properly. Users of the counter outside of the
> > > kernel would have to do the same.
> > > So the question is why to account something that needs to be basically
> > > excluded for each reasonable usage. This doesn't make much sense to me.
> > >
> > > It seems that this has been broken since hugetlb was introduced but I
> > > haven't checked the whole history.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
> >
> > Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
>
> Thanks!
>
> > This makes a lot of sense to me. The only thing I worry about is the
> > proliferation of PageHuge(), a function call, in relatively hot paths.
>
> I've tried that (see the patch below) but it enlarged the code by almost
> 1k
> text data bss dec hex filename
> 510323 74273 44440 629036 9992c mm/built-in.o.before
> 511248 74273 44440 629961 99cc9 mm/built-in.o.after
>
> I am not sure the code size increase is worth it. Maybe we can reduce
> the check to only PageCompound(page) as huge pages are no in the page
> cache (yet).
>

That would be a more sensible route because it also avoids exposing the
hugetlbfs destructor unnecessarily.

--
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs