Re: [PATCH v2 4/4] mm/vmalloc: Hugepage vmalloc mappings

Christoph Hellwig
2020-04-14T07:23:31Z

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 10:53:03PM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> For platforms that define HAVE_ARCH_HUGE_VMAP and support PMD vmap mappings,
> have vmalloc attempt to allocate PMD-sized pages first, before falling back
> to small pages. Allocations which use something other than PAGE_KERNEL
> protections are not permitted to use huge pages yet, not all callers expect
> this (e.g., module allocations vs strict module rwx).
>
> This gives a 6x reduction in dTLB misses for a `git diff` (of linux), from
> 45600 to 6500 and a 2.2% reduction in cycles on a 2-node POWER9.
>
> This can result in more internal fragmentation and memory overhead for a
> given allocation. It can also cause greater NUMA unbalance on hashdist
> allocations.
>
> There may be other callers that expect small pages under vmalloc but use
> PAGE_KERNEL, I'm not sure if it's feasible to catch them all. An
> alternative would be a new function or flag which enables large mappings,
> and use that in callers.

Why do we even use vmalloc in this case rather than just doing a huge
page allocation? What callers are you intersted in?