Re: [PATCH] mm: Free per cpu pages async to shorten program exit time

Vlastimil Babka
2021-10-08T12:38:27Z

On 10/8/21 10:17, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 08.10.21 08:39, ultrachin@163.com wrote:
>> From: chen xiaoguang <xiaoggchen@tencent.com>
>>
>> The exit time is long when program allocated big memory and
>> the most time consuming part is free memory which takes 99.9%
>> of the total exit time. By using async free we can save 25% of
>> exit time.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: chen xiaoguang <xiaoggchen@tencent.com>
>> Signed-off-by: zeng jingxiang <linuszeng@tencent.com>
>> Signed-off-by: lu yihui <yihuilu@tencent.com>
>
> I recently discussed with Claudio if it would be possible to tear down the
> process MM deferred, because for some use cases (secure/encrypted
> virtualization, very large mmaps) tearing down the page tables is already
> the much more expensive operation.

OK, but what exactly is the benefit here? The cpu time will have to be spent
in any case, but we move it to a context that's not accounted to the exiting
process. Is that good? Also if it's a large process and restarts
immediately, allocating all the memory back again, it might not be available
as it's still being freed in the background, leading to a risk of OOM?

> There is mmdrop_async(), and I wondered if one could reuse that concept when
> tearing down a process -- I didn't look into feasibility, however, so it's
> just some very rough idea.
>