[PATCH 6.6 29/84] arm64, mm: avoid always making PTE dirty in pte_mkwrite()

Greg Kroah-Hartman
2025-10-27T19:18:03Z

6.6-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.

------------------

From: Huang Ying <ying.huang@linux.alibaba.com>

[ Upstream commit 143937ca51cc6ae2fccc61a1cb916abb24cd34f5 ]

Current pte_mkwrite_novma() makes PTE dirty unconditionally. This may
mark some pages that are never written dirty wrongly. For example,
do_swap_page() may map the exclusive pages with writable and clean PTEs
if the VMA is writable and the page fault is for read access.
However, current pte_mkwrite_novma() implementation always dirties the
PTE. This may cause unnecessary disk writing if the pages are
never written before being reclaimed.

So, change pte_mkwrite_novma() to clear the PTE_RDONLY bit only if the
PTE_DIRTY bit is set to make it possible to make the PTE writable and
clean.

The current behavior was introduced in commit 73e86cb03cf2 ("arm64:
Move PTE_RDONLY bit handling out of set_pte_at()"). Before that,
pte_mkwrite() only sets the PTE_WRITE bit, while set_pte_at() only
clears the PTE_RDONLY bit if both the PTE_WRITE and the PTE_DIRTY bits
are set.

To test the performance impact of the patch, on an arm64 server
machine, run 16 redis-server processes on socket 1 and 16
memtier_benchmark processes on socket 0 with mostly get
transactions (that is, redis-server will mostly read memory only).
The memory footprint of redis-server is larger than the available
memory, so swap out/in will be triggered. Test results show that the
patch can avoid most swapping out because the pages are mostly clean.
And the benchmark throughput improves ~23.9% in the test.

Fixes: 73e86cb03cf2 ("arm64: Move PTE_RDONLY bit handling out of set_pte_at()")
Signed-off-by: Huang Ying <ying.huang@linux.alibaba.com>
Cc: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Cc: Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@arm.com>
Cc: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com>
Cc: Gavin Shan <gshan@redhat.com>
Cc: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Yicong Yang <yangyicong@hisilicon.com>
Cc: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Reviewed-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
---
arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h | 3 ++-
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
index 0212129b13d07..92e43b3a10df9 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
+++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
@@ -184,7 +184,8 @@ static inline pmd_t set_pmd_bit(pmd_t pmd, pgprot_t prot)
static inline pte_t pte_mkwrite_novma(pte_t pte)
{
pte = set_pte_bit(pte, __pgprot(PTE_WRITE));
- pte = clear_pte_bit(pte, __pgprot(PTE_RDONLY));
+ if (pte_sw_dirty(pte))
+ pte = clear_pte_bit(pte, __pgprot(PTE_RDONLY));
return pte;
}

--
2.51.0