Re: [PATCH v9 2/8] mm/huge_memory: add two new (not yet used) functions for folio_split()

Zi Yan
2025-03-07T15:25:08Z

On 6 Mar 2025, at 11:21, Zi Yan wrote:

> On 5 Mar 2025, at 17:38, Hugh Dickins wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 5 Mar 2025, Zi Yan wrote:
>>> On 5 Mar 2025, at 16:03, Hugh Dickins wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Beyond checking that, I didn't have time yesterday to investigate
>>>> further, but I'll try again today (still using last weekend's mm.git).
>>>
>>> I am trying to replicate your runs locally. Can you clarify your steps
>>> of “kernel builds on huge tmpfs while swapping to SSD”? Do you impose
>>> a memory limit so that anonymous memory is swapped to SSD or make tmpfs
>>> swap to SSD?
>>
>> Yeah, my heart sank a bit when I saw Andrew (with good intention) asking
>> you to repeat my testing.
>>
>> We could spend weeks going back and forth on that, and neither of us has
>> weeks to spare.
>>
>> "To fulfil contractual obligations" I'll mail you the tarfile I send
>> out each time I'm asked for this; but I haven't updated that tarfile
>> in four years, whereas I'm frequently tweaking things to match what's
>> needed (most recently and relevantly, I guess enabling 64kB hugepages
>> for anon and shmem in addition to the PMD-sized).
>>
>> Please don't waste much of your time over trying to replicate what
>> I'm doing: just give the scripts a glance, as a source for "oh,
>> I could exercise something like that in my testing too" ideas.
>>
>> Yes, I limit physical memory by booting with mem=1G, and also apply
>> lower memcg v1 limits.
>>
>> I made a point of saying "SSD" there because I'm not testing zram or
>> zswap at all, whereas many others are testing those rather than disk.
>>
>> swapoff, and ext4 on loop0 on tmpfs, feature in what I exercise, but are
>> NOT relevant to the corruption I'm seeing here - that can occur before
>> any swapoff, and it's always on the kernel build in tmpfs: the parallel
>> build in ext4 on loop0 on tmpfs completes successfully.
>
> Thanks for the scripts. I kinda replicate your setup as follows:
>
> 1. boot a VM with 1GB memory and 8 cores;
> 2. mount a tmpfs with huge=always and 200GB;
> 3. clone the mainline kernel and use x86_64 defconfig (my gcc 14 gives
> errors during the old kernel builds), this takes about 2GB space,
> so some of tmpfs is already swapped to SSD;
> 4. create a new cgroupv2 and set memory.high to 700MB to induce memory
> swap during kernel compilation;
> 5. run “while true; do echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/compact_memory >/dev/null; done” to trigger compaction all the time;
> 6. build the kernel with make -j20.
>
> I ran the above on mm-everything-2025-03-05-03-54 plus the xarray fix v3,
> folio_split() with your fixes, and Minimize xa_node allocation during
> xarry split patches. The repo is at: https://github.com/x-y-z/linux-dev/tree/shmem_fix-mm-everything-2025-03-05-03-54.
>
> It has ran over night for 30 kernel builds and no crash happened so far.
> I wonder if you can give my repo a shot.
>
> I just boosted khugepaged like you did and see no immediate crash. But I will
> let it run for longer.

I have run this over night and have not seen any crash. I assume it is stable.
I am going to send V10 and resend Minimize xa_node allocation during xarry split.

Best Regards,
Yan, Zi