Re: [RFC] mm: stress-ng --mremap triggers severe lruvec lock contention in populate/unmap paths

Lorenzo Stoakes
2026-04-09T18:44:02Z

On Thu, Apr 09, 2026 at 06:15:50PM +0000, Haakon Bugge wrote:
>
>
> > On 9 Apr 2026, at 20:03, Lorenzo Stoakes <ljs@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Apr 07, 2026 at 05:35:18PM -0700, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> >> On Tue, 7 Apr 2026, John Hubbard wrote:
> >>> On 4/7/26 1:09 PM, Joseph Salisbury wrote:
> >>>> Hello,
> >>>>
> >>>> I would like to ask for feedback on an MM performance issue triggered by
> >>>> stress-ng's mremap stressor:
> >>>>
> >>>> stress-ng --mremap 8192 --mremap-bytes 4K --timeout 30 --metrics-brief
> >>>>
> >>>> This was first investigated as a possible regression from 0ca0c24e3211
> >>>> ("mm: store zero pages to be swapped out in a bitmap"), but the current
> >>>> evidence suggests that commit is mostly exposing an older problem for
> >>>> this workload rather than directly causing it.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> Can you try this out? (Adding Hugh to Cc.)
> >>>
> >>> From: John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>
> >>> Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2026 15:33:47 -0700
> >>> Subject: [PATCH] mm/gup: skip lru_add_drain() for non-locked populate
> >>> X-NVConfidentiality: public
> >>> Cc: John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>
> >>>
> >>> populate_vma_page_range() calls lru_add_drain() unconditionally after
> >>> __get_user_pages(). With high-frequency single-page MAP_POPULATE/munmap
> >>> cycles at high thread counts, this forces a lruvec->lru_lock acquire
> >>> per page, defeating per-CPU folio_batch batching.
> >>>
> >>> The drain was added by commit ece369c7e104 ("mm/munlock: add
> >>> lru_add_drain() to fix memcg_stat_test") for VM_LOCKED populate, where
> >>> unevictable page stats must be accurate after faulting. Non-locked VMAs
> >>> have no such requirement. Skip the drain for them.
> >>>
> >>> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
> >>> Signed-off-by: John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>
> >>
> >> Thanks for the Cc. I'm not convinced that we should be making such a
> >> change, just to avoid the stress that an avowed stresstest is showing;
> >> but can let others debate that - and, need it be said, I have no
> >> problem with Joseph trying your patch.
> >
> > Yeah, the test case (as said by others also) is rather synthetic, and it's a
> > test designed to saturate, if not I/O throttled by swap then we hammer the
> > populate path. It feels like a micro-optimisation for something that is not (at
> > least not yet demonstrated to be) an actual problem.
> >
> > stress-ng is not a benchmarking tool per se, it's designed to eek out bugs.
> >
> > So really we need to see a real-world case I think.
> >
> >>
> >> I tend to stand by my comment in that commit, that it's not just for
> >> VM_LOCKED: I believe it's in everyone's interest that a bulk faulting
> >> interface like populate_vma_page_range() or faultin_vma_page_range()
> >> should drain its local pagevecs at the end, to save others sometimes
> >> needing the much more expensive lru_add_drain_all().
> >
> > I mean yeah, but I guess anywhere that _really_ needs to be sure of the drain
> > has to do an lru_add_drain_all(), because it'd be fragile to rely on
> > lru_add_drain()'s being done at the right time?
> >
> >>
> >> But lru_add_drain() and lru_add_drain_all(): there's so much to be
> >> said and agonized over there They've distressed me for years, and
> >> are a hot topic for us at present. But I won't be able to contribute
> >> more on that subject, not this week.
> >
> > Yeah they do feel rather delicate... :) sometimes you _really do_ need to know
> > everything's drained. But other times it feels a bit whack-a-mole.
> >
> > I also do agree it makes sense to drain locally after a batch operation.
> >
> > It all comes down to whether this manifests in a real-world case, at which point
> > maybe this is a more useful change?
> >
> >>
> >> Hugh
> >>
> >>> ---
> >>> mm/gup.c | 13 ++++++++++++-
> >>> 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >>>
> >>> diff --git a/mm/gup.c b/mm/gup.c
> >>> index 8e7dc2c6ee73..2dd5de1cb5b9 100644
> >>> --- a/mm/gup.c
> >>> +++ b/mm/gup.c
> >>> @@ -1816,6 +1816,7 @@ long populate_vma_page_range(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
> >>> struct mm_struct *mm = vma->vm_mm;
> >>> unsigned long nr_pages = (end - start) / PAGE_SIZE;
> >>> int local_locked = 1;
> >>> + bool need_drain;
> >>> int gup_flags;
> >>> long ret;
> >>>
> >>> @@ -1857,9 +1858,19 @@ long populate_vma_page_range(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
> >>> * We made sure addr is within a VMA, so the following will
> >>> * not result in a stack expansion that recurses back here.
> >>> */
> >>> + /*
> >>> + * Read VM_LOCKED before __get_user_pages(), which may drop
> >>> + * mmap_lock when FOLL_UNLOCKABLE is set, after which the vma
> >>> + * must not be accessed. The read is stable: mmap_lock is held
> >>> + * for read here, so mlock() (which needs the write lock)
> >>> + * cannot change VM_LOCKED concurrently.
> >>> + */
> >
> > BTW, not to nitpick (OK, maybe to nitpick :) this comments feels a bit
> > redundant. Maybe useful to note that the lock might be dropped (but you don't
> > indicate why it's OK to still assume state about the VMA), and it's a known
> > thing that you need a VMA write lock to alter flags, if we had to comment this
> > each time mm would be mostly comments :)
> >
> > So if you want a comment here I'd say something like 'the lock might be dropped
> > due to FOLL_UNLOCKABLE, but that's ok, we would simply end up doing a redundant
> > drain in this case'.
> >
> > But I'm not sure it's needed?
> >
> >>> + need_drain = vma->vm_flags & VM_LOCKED;
> >
> > Please use the new VMA flag interface :)
> >
> > need_drain = vma_test(VMA_LOCKED_BIT);
> >
>
> I think we all agree that the stress-ng test case is synthetic. I evaluated John's patch as I understood that was requested, and the outcome was, merely, as expected.

(Please wrap lines :)

Ack re: synthetic.

Thanks for evaluating it! I don't think John's patch is incorrect per se, but as
I said on reply further up thread, I fear this all might be rather a distraction
from a real world perspective, because you'd expect similar results due to
reasons other than the lruvec being a bit *ahem* sub-optimal shall we say.

>
> The fio case is more interesting, as, if my runs make sense, it improves IOPS by ~20% and avoid threads being stuck at termination. But, I am not intimate with fio, so take that part as a grain of salt.

That is interesting, but again I wonder what it's actually measuring, because if
things are getting stuck because of saturation from stress-ng doing insane
things (hammering the hell out of madvise(..., MAP_PAGEOUT), mremap(), munmap()
in the hot path, all while not caring about NUMA node locality), then that's
sort of what you'd expect I guess?

I guess the only way to avoid possibly measuring the wrong thing is to examine a
real-world case, and if there is something lurking there with lruvec scalability
(very possible) then we can definitely look at that!

Thanks for digging into this!

>
>
> Thxs, Håkon
>
>

Cheers, Lorenzo