Re: [PATCH] fuse: when copying a folio delay the mark dirty until the end

Darrick J. Wong
2026-03-19T04:27:28Z

On Wed, Mar 18, 2026 at 06:32:25PM -0700, Joanne Koong wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2026 at 2:52 PM Bernd Schubert <bernd@bsbernd.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Joanne,
> >
> > On 3/18/26 22:19, Joanne Koong wrote:
> > > On Wed, Mar 18, 2026 at 7:03 AM Horst Birthelmer <horst@birthelmer.de> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> Hi Joanne,
> > >>
> > >> I wonder, would something like this help for large folios?
> > >
> > > Hi Horst,
> > >
> > > I don't think it's likely that the pages backing the userspace buffer
> > > are large folios, so I think this may actually add extra overhead with
> > > the extra folio_test_dirty() check.
> > >
> > > From what I've seen, the main cost that dwarfs everything else for
> > > writes/reads is the actual IO, the context switches, and the memcpys.
> > > I think compared to these things, the set_page_dirty_lock() cost is
> > > negligible and pretty much undetectable.
> >
> >
> > a little bit background here. We see in cpu flame graphs that the spin
> > lock taken in unlock_request() and unlock_request() takes about the same
> > amount of CPU time as the memcpy. Interestingly, only on Intel, but not
> > AMD CPUs. Note that we are running with out custom page pinning, which
> > just takes the pages from an array, so iov_iter_get_pages2() is not used.
> >
> > The reason for that unlock/lock is documented at the end of
> > Documentation/filesystems/fuse/fuse.rst as Kamikaze file system. Well we
> > don't have that, so for now these checks are modified in our branches to
> > avoid the lock. Although that is not upstreamable. Right solution is
> > here to extract an array of pages and do that unlock/lock per pagevec.
> >
> > Next in the flame graph is setting that set_page_dirty_lock which also
> > takes as much CPU time as the memcpy. Again, Intel CPUs only.
> > In the combination with the above pagevec method, I think right solution
> > is to iterate over the pages, stores the last folio and then set to
> > dirty once per folio.
>
> Thanks for the background context. The intel vs amd difference is
> interesting. The approaches you mention sound reasonable. Are you able
> to share the flame graph or is this easily repro-able using fio on the
> passthrough_hp server?
>
>
> > Also, I disagree about that the userspace buffers are not likely large
> > folios, see commit
> > 59ba47b6be9cd0146ef9a55c6e32e337e11e7625 "fuse: Check for large folio)
> > with SPLICE_F_MOVE". Especially Horst persistently runs into it when
> > doing xfstests with recent kernels. I think the issue came up first time
>
> I think that's because xfstests uses /tmp for scratch space, so the
>
> "This is easily reproducible (on 6.19) with
> CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_SHMEM_HUGE_ALWAYS=y
> CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_TMPFS_HUGE_ALWAYS=y"
>
> triggers it but on production workloads I don't think it's likely that
> those source pages are backed by shmem/tmpfs or exist in the page
> cache already as a large folio as the server has no control over that.

/me stumbles in-thread to note that xfs gets large folios for its files'
pagecache fairly frequently now, especially as readahead ramps up.

Ok back to the hell that is deploying ClownStrike through a Java program
while Firefox repeatedly drives my laptop to OOM.

--D

> I also don't think most applications use splice, though maybe I'm
> wrong here.
>
> For non-splice, even if the user sets
> "/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled" to 'always' or in
> libfuse we do madvise on the buffer allocation for huge pages, that
> has a 2 MB granularity requirement which depends on the user system
> also having explicitly upped the max pages limit through the sysctl
> since the kernel fuse max pages limit is 256 (1 MB) by default. I
> don't think that is common on most servers.
>
> Thanks,
> Joanne
>
> > with 3.18ish.
> >
> > One can further enforce that by setting
> > "/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled" to 'always', what I did
> > when I tested the above commit. And actually that points out that
> > libfuse allocations should do the madvise. I'm going to do that during
> > the next days, maybe tomorrow.
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Bernd
>