Re: [PATCH v3 12/12] mm/gup: Handle hugetlb in the generic follow_page_mask code

Jason Gunthorpe
2024-03-22T13:30:17Z

On Thu, Mar 21, 2024 at 06:08:02PM -0400, peterx@redhat.com wrote:

> A quick performance test on an aarch64 VM on M1 chip shows 15% degrade over
> a tight loop of slow gup after the path switched. That shouldn't be a
> problem because slow-gup should not be a hot path for GUP in general: when
> page is commonly present, fast-gup will already succeed, while when the
> page is indeed missing and require a follow up page fault, the slow gup
> degrade will probably buried in the fault paths anyway. It also explains
> why slow gup for THP used to be very slow before 57edfcfd3419 ("mm/gup:
> accelerate thp gup even for "pages != NULL"") lands, the latter not part of
> a performance analysis but a side benefit. If the performance will be a
> concern, we can consider handle CONT_PTE in follow_page().

I think this is probably fine for the moment, at least for this
series, as CONT_PTE is still very new.

But it will need to be optimized. "slow" GUP is the only GUP that is
used by FOLL_LONGTERM and it still needs to be optimized because you
can't assume a FOLL_LONGTERM user will be hitting the really slow
fault path. There are enough important cases where it is just reading
already populted page tables, and these days, often with large folios.

Reviewed-by: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>

Jason