Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] mm/page_alloc: free order-0 pages through PCP in page_frag_free()

[Tariq Toukan <tariqt@mellanox.com>]

On 06/11/2018 7:28 AM, Aaron Lu wrote:
> page_frag_free() calls __free_pages_ok() to free the page back to
> Buddy. This is OK for high order page, but for order-0 pages, it
> misses the optimization opportunity of using Per-Cpu-Pages and can
> cause zone lock contention when called frequently.
> 
> Paweł Staszewski recently shared his result of 'how Linux kernel
> handles normal traffic'[1] and from perf data, Jesper Dangaard Brouer
> found the lock contention comes from page allocator:
> 
>    mlx5e_poll_tx_cq
>    |
>     --16.34%--napi_consume_skb
>               |
>               |--12.65%--__free_pages_ok
>               |          |
>               |           --11.86%--free_one_page
>               |                     |
>               |                     |--10.10%--queued_spin_lock_slowpath
>               |                     |
>               |                      --0.65%--_raw_spin_lock
>               |
>               |--1.55%--page_frag_free
>               |
>                --1.44%--skb_release_data
> 
> Jesper explained how it happened: mlx5 driver RX-page recycle
> mechanism is not effective in this workload and pages have to go
> through the page allocator. The lock contention happens during
> mlx5 DMA TX completion cycle. And the page allocator cannot keep
> up at these speeds.[2]
> 
> I thought that __free_pages_ok() are mostly freeing high order
> pages and thought this is an lock contention for high order pages
> but Jesper explained in detail that __free_pages_ok() here are
> actually freeing order-0 pages because mlx5 is using order-0 pages
> to satisfy its page pool allocation request.[3]
> 

Thanks for your patch!
Acked-by: Tariq Toukan <tariqt@mellanox.com>

> The free path as pointed out by Jesper is:
> skb_free_head()
>    -> skb_free_frag()
>      -> page_frag_free()
> And the pages being freed on this path are order-0 pages.
> 
> Fix this by doing similar things as in __page_frag_cache_drain() -
> send the being freed page to PCP if it's an order-0 page, or
> directly to Buddy if it is a high order page.
> 
> With this change, Paweł hasn't noticed lock contention yet in
> his workload and Jesper has noticed a 7% performance improvement
> using a micro benchmark and lock contention is gone. Ilias' test
> on a 'low' speed 1Gbit interface on an cortex-a53 shows ~11%
> performance boost testing with 64byte packets and __free_pages_ok()
> disappeared from perf top.
> 
> [1]: https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg531362.html
> [2]: https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg531421.html
> [3]: https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg531556.html
> Reported-by: Paweł Staszewski <pstaszewski@itcare.pl>
> Analysed-by: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>
> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
> Acked-by: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>
> Acked-by: Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>
> Tested-by: Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>
> Acked-by: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@linux.intel.com>
> Signed-off-by: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com>
> ---
> v2: only changelog changes:
>      - remove the duplicated skb_free_frag() as pointed by Jesper;
>      - add Ilias' test result;
>      - add people's ack/test tag.
> 
>   mm/page_alloc.c | 10 ++++++++--
>   1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
> index ae31839874b8..91a9a6af41a2 100644
> --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> @@ -4555,8 +4555,14 @@ void page_frag_free(void *addr)
>   {
>   	struct page *page = virt_to_head_page(addr);
>   
> -	if (unlikely(put_page_testzero(page)))
> -		__free_pages_ok(page, compound_order(page));
> +	if (unlikely(put_page_testzero(page))) {
> +		unsigned int order = compound_order(page);
> +
> +		if (order == 0)
> +			free_unref_page(page);
> +		else
> +			__free_pages_ok(page, order);
> +	}
>   }
>   EXPORT_SYMBOL(page_frag_free);
>   
>