Re: [PATCH v7 0/7] mm: Hot page tracking and promotion infrastructure

Bharata B Rao
2026-05-06T03:44:02Z

On 06-May-26 3:47 AM, Balbir Singh wrote:
> On 5/5/26 06:36, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> On Mon, May 04, 2026 at 11:39:17AM +0530, Bharata B Rao wrote:
>>> This is v7 of pghot, a hot-page tracking and promotion subsystem. The
>>
>> I continue to think we should not do this.
>>
>
> I am unclear about the benefits of the patchset, I have not tested
> it or reviewed the latest revision. My big concern was that top-tier
> might not always be suitable.

So you are saying that we should have a capability to promote accessed pages
from lower tier to an other tier that is not classified as top tier? Is that
non-top tier node the one which generates accesses?

>
> I see that there are some numbers posted, but I find this weird
> "After the graph creation, the processes are stopped and data is migrated
> to CXL node 2 before continuing so that BFS phase starts accessing lower
> tier memory." Why not allocate everything on CXL node 2?

In the ideal scenario, the benefit is to see if any pages that land up on lower
tier get identified as hot and get promoted. That means we need to create an
over-committed scenario where the pages get demoted first. I have provided
numbers from such cases in my previous versions. The problem with this case is
that the base hot page promotion (NUMAB2) hasn't shown any benefit at all with
my micro-benchmark - Ref:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/868004d8-bb8e-4800-9fdd-ade48e95fe3b@amd.com/

Same has been observed with redis-memtier benchmark -
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/957f2242-56d4-4bf0-8aeb-9d60fbea8c8c@amd.com/

Instead what I am doing here is to take out demotion from the scenario but still
retain the access pattern of the benchmark by pushing out the data to lower tier
when the benchmark reaches steady allocation state.

Regards,
Bharata.