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

Zi Yan
2025-03-06T16:22:01Z

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.

Thanks.

Best Regards,
Yan, Zi