Re: [RFC 0/6] migrate_pages(): batch TLB flushing

Alistair Popple
2022-09-26T09:25:52Z

Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com> writes:

> From: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
>
> Now, migrate_pages() migrate pages one by one, like the fake code as
> follows,
>
> for each page
> unmap
> flush TLB
> copy
> restore map
>
> If multiple pages are passed to migrate_pages(), there are
> opportunities to batch the TLB flushing and copying. That is, we can
> change the code to something as follows,
>
> for each page
> unmap
> for each page
> flush TLB
> for each page
> copy
> for each page
> restore map

We use a very similar sequence for the migrate_vma_*() set of calls. It
would be good if we could one day consolidate the two. I believe the
biggest hindrance to that is migrate_vma_*() operates on arrays of pfns
rather than a list of pages. The reason for that is it needs to migrate
non-lru pages and hence can't use page->lru to create a list of pages to
migrate.

So from my perspective I think this direction is good as it would help
with that. One thing to watch out for is deadlocking if locking multiple
pages though.

> The total number of TLB flushing IPI can be reduced considerably. And
> we may use some hardware accelerator such as DSA to accelerate the
> page copying.
>
> So in this patch, we refactor the migrate_pages() implementation and
> implement the TLB flushing batching. Base on this, hardware
> accelerated page copying can be implemented.
>
> If too many pages are passed to migrate_pages(), in the naive batched
> implementation, we may unmap too many pages at the same time. The
> possibility for a task to wait for the migrated pages to be mapped
> again increases. So the latency may be hurt. To deal with this
> issue, the max number of pages be unmapped in batch is restricted to
> no more than HPAGE_PMD_NR. That is, the influence is at the same
> level of THP migration.
>
> We use the following test to measure the performance impact of the
> patchset,
>
> On a 2-socket Intel server,
>
> - Run pmbench memory accessing benchmark
>
> - Run `migratepages` to migrate pages of pmbench between node 0 and
> node 1 back and forth.
>
> With the patch, the TLB flushing IPI reduces 99.1% during the test and
> the number of pages migrated successfully per second increases 291.7%.
>
> This patchset is based on v6.0-rc5 and the following patchset,
>
> [PATCH -V3 0/8] migrate_pages(): fix several bugs in error path
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220817081408.513338-1-ying.huang@intel.com/
>
> The migrate_pages() related code is converting to folio now. So this
> patchset cannot apply recent akpm/mm-unstable branch. This patchset
> is used to check the basic idea. If it is OK, I will rebase the
> patchset on top of folio changes.
>
> Best Regards,
> Huang, Ying