Re: [PATCH v3 1/6] mm/thp: add prep_transhuge_device_private_page()

Ralph Campbell
2020-11-06T20:34:54Z

On 11/6/20 4:14 AM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 05, 2020 at 04:51:42PM -0800, Ralph Campbell wrote:
>> Add a helper function to allow device drivers to create device private
>> transparent huge pages. This is intended to help support device private
>> THP migrations.
>
> I think you'd be better off with these calling conventions:
>
> -void prep_transhuge_page(struct page *page)
> +struct page *thp_prep(struct page *page)
> {
> + if (!page || compound_order(page) == 0)
> + return page;
> /*
> - * we use page->mapping and page->indexlru in second tail page
> + * we use page->mapping and page->index in second tail page
> * as list_head: assuming THP order >= 2
> */
> + BUG_ON(compound_order(page) == 1);
>
> INIT_LIST_HEAD(page_deferred_list(page));
> set_compound_page_dtor(page, TRANSHUGE_PAGE_DTOR);
> +
> + return page;
> }
>
> It simplifies the users.

I'm not sure what the simplification is.
If you mean the name change from prep_transhuge_page() to thp_prep(),
that seems fine to me. The following could also be renamed to
thp_prep_device_private_page() or similar.

>> +void prep_transhuge_device_private_page(struct page *page)
>> +{
>> + prep_compound_page(page, HPAGE_PMD_ORDER);
>> + prep_transhuge_page(page);
>> + /* Only the head page has a reference to the pgmap. */
>> + percpu_ref_put_many(page->pgmap->ref, HPAGE_PMD_NR - 1);
>> +}
>> +EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(prep_transhuge_device_private_page);
>
> Something else that may interest you from my patch series is support
> for page sizes other than PMD_SIZE. I don't know what page sizes
> hardware supports. There's no support for page sizes other than PMD
> for anonymous memory, so this might not be too useful for you yet.

I did see those changes. It might help some device drivers to do DMA in
larger than PAGE_SIZE blocks but less than PMD_SIZE. It might help
reduce page table sizes since 2MB, 64K, and 4K are commonly supported
GPU page sizes. The MIGRATE_PFN_COMPOUND flag is intended to indicate
that the page size is determined by page_size() so I was thinking ahead
to other than PMD sized pages. However, when migrating a pte_none() or
pmd_none() page, there is no source page to determine the size.
Maybe I need to encode the page order in the migrate PFN entry like
hmm_range_fault().

Anyway, I agree that thinking about page sizes other than PMD is good.