Re: [PATCH 9/9] x86/clear_huge_page: make clear_contig_region() preemptible

Peter Zijlstra
2023-04-05T20:28:58Z

On Sun, Apr 02, 2023 at 10:22:33PM -0700, Ankur Arora wrote:
> clear_contig_region() can be used to clear up to a huge-page (2MB/1GB)
> chunk Allow preemption in the irqentry_exit path to make sure we don't
> hold on to the CPU for an arbitrarily long period.
>
> Performance: vm-scalability/case-anon-w-seq-hugetlb mmaps an anonymous
> hugetlb-2mb region, and then writes sequentially to the region, demand
> faulting pages on the way.
>
> This test, with a CONFIG_VOLUNTARY config shows the effects of this
> change: stime drops (~18% on Icelakex, ~5% on Milan), while the utime
> goes up (~15% on Icelakex, ~13% on Milan.)
>
> *Icelakex* mm/clear_huge_page x86/clear_huge_page change
> (mem=4GB/task, tasks=128)
>
> stime 293.02 +- .49% 239.39 +- .83% -18.30%
> utime 440.11 +- .28% 508.74 +- .60% +15.59%
> wall-clock 5.96 +- .33% 6.27 +-2.23% + 5.20%
>
>
>
> *Milan* mm/clear_huge_page x86/clear_huge_page change
> (mem=1GB/task, tasks=512)
>
> stime 490.95 +- 3.55% 466.90 +- 4.79% - 4.89%
> utime 276.43 +- 2.85% 311.97 +- 5.15% +12.85%
> wall-clock 3.74 +- 6.41% 3.58 +- 7.82% - 4.27%
>
> The drop in stime is due to REP; STOS being more efficient for bigger
> extents. The increase in utime is due to cache effects of that change:
> mm/clear_huge_page() clears page-at-a-time, while narrowing towards the
> faulting page; while x86/clear_huge_page only optimizes for cache
> locality in the local neighbourhood of the faulting address.
>
> This effect on utime is visible via the increased L1-dcache-load-misses
> and LLC-load* and an increased backend boundedness for perf user-stat
> --all-user on Icelakex. The effect is slight but given the heavy cache
> pressure generated by the test, shows up in the drop in user IPC:
>
> - 9,455,243,414,829 instructions # 2.75 insn per cycle ( +- 14.14% ) (46.17%)
> - 2,367,920,864,112 L1-dcache-loads # 1.054 G/sec ( +- 14.14% ) (69.24%)
> - 42,075,182,813 L1-dcache-load-misses # 2.96% of all L1-dcache accesses ( +- 14.14% ) (69.24%)
> - 20,365,688 LLC-loads # 9.064 K/sec ( +- 13.98% ) (69.24%)
> - 890,382 LLC-load-misses # 7.18% of all LL-cache accesses ( +- 14.91% ) (69.24%)
>
> + 9,467,796,660,698 instructions # 2.37 insn per cycle ( +- 14.14% ) (46.16%)
> + 2,369,973,307,561 L1-dcache-loads # 1.027 G/sec ( +- 14.14% ) (69.24%)
> + 42,155,621,201 L1-dcache-load-misses # 2.96% of all L1-dcache accesses ( +- 14.14% ) (69.24%)
> + 22,116,300 LLC-loads # 9.588 K/sec ( +- 14.20% ) (69.24%)
> + 1,355,607 LLC-load-misses # 10.29% of all LL-cache accesses ( +- 15.49% ) (69.25%)
>
> Given the fact that the stime improves for all loads using this path,
> while the utime drop is load dependent add this change.

Either I really need sleep, or *NONE* of the above is actually relevant
to what the patch below actually does!

The above talks about the glories of using large clears, while the patch
allows reschedules which are about latency.

> Signed-off-by: Ankur Arora <ankur.a.arora@oracle.com>
> ---
> arch/x86/mm/hugetlbpage.c | 10 ++++++++++
> 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/hugetlbpage.c b/arch/x86/mm/hugetlbpage.c
> index 4294b77c4f18..c8564b0552e5 100644
> --- a/arch/x86/mm/hugetlbpage.c
> +++ b/arch/x86/mm/hugetlbpage.c
> @@ -158,7 +158,17 @@ hugetlb_get_unmapped_area(struct file *file, unsigned long addr,
> static void clear_contig_region(struct page *page, unsigned long vaddr,
> unsigned int npages)
> {
> + might_sleep();
> +
> + /*
> + * We might be clearing a large region.
> + * Allow rescheduling.
> + */
> + allow_resched();
> clear_user_pages(page_address(page), vaddr, page, npages);
> + disallow_resched();
> +
> + cond_resched();
> }
>
> void clear_huge_page(struct page *page,
> --
> 2.31.1
>