Re: [PATCH 0/3] mm: split the file's i_mmap tree for NUMA

Mateusz Guzik
2026-04-16T10:30:05Z

On Tue, Apr 14, 2026 at 11:11 AM Huang Shijie <huangsj@hygon.cn> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 05:33:21PM +0200, Mateusz Guzik wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 02:20:39PM +0800, Huang Shijie wrote:
> > > In NUMA, there are maybe many NUMA nodes and many CPUs.
> > > For example, a Hygon's server has 12 NUMA nodes, and 384 CPUs.
> > > In the UnixBench tests, there is a test "execl" which tests
> > > the execve system call.
> > >
> > > When we test our server with "./Run -c 384 execl",
> > > the test result is not good enough. The i_mmap locks contended heavily on
> > > "libc.so" and "ld.so". For example, the i_mmap tree for "libc.so" can have
> > > over 6000 VMAs, all the VMAs can be in different NUMA mode.
> > > The insert/remove operations do not run quickly enough.
> > >
> > > patch 1 & patch 2 are try to hide the direct access of i_mmap.
> > > patch 3 splits the i_mmap into sibling trees, and we can get better
> > > performance with this patch set:
> > > we can get 77% performance improvement(10 times average)
> > >
> >
> > To my reading you kept the lock as-is and only distributed the protected
> > state.
> >
> > While I don't doubt the improvement, I'm confident should you take a
> > look at the profile you are going to find this still does not scale with
> > rwsem being one of the problems (there are other global locks, some of
> > which have experimental patches for).
> IMHO, when the number of VMAs in the i_mmap is very large, only optimise the rwsem
> lock does not help too much for our NUMA case.
>
> In our NUMA server, the remote access could be the major issue.
>

I'm confused how this is not supposed to help. You moved your data to
be stored per-domain. With my proposal the lock itself will also get
that treatment.

Modulo the issue of what to do with code wanting to iterate the entire
thing, this is blatantly faster.

>
> >
> > Apart from that this does nothing to help high core systems which are
> > all one node, which imo puts another question mark on this specific
> > proposal.
> Yes, this patch set only focus on the NUMA case.
> The one-node case should use the original i_mmap.
>
> Maybe I can add a new config, CONFIG_SPILT_I_MMAP. The config is disabled
> by default, and enabled when the NUMA node is not one.
>
> >
> > Of course one may question whether a RB tree is the right choice here,
> > it may be the lock-protected cost can go way down with merely a better
> > data structure.
> >
> > Regardless of that, for actual scalability, there will be no way around
> > decentralazing locking around this and partitioning per some core count
> > (not just by numa awareness).
> >
> > Decentralizing locking is definitely possible, but I have not looked
> > into specifics of how problematic it is. Best case scenario it will
> > merely with separate locks. Worst case scenario something needs a fully
> > stabilized state for traversal, in that case another rw lock can be
> Yes.
>
> The traversal may need to hold many locks.
>

The very paragraph you partially quoted answers what to do in that
case: wrap everything with a new rwsem taken for reading when
adding/removing entries and taken for writing when iterating the
entire thing. Then the iteration sticks to one lock.

The new rw lock puts an upper ceiling on scalability of the thing, but
it is way higher than the current state.

Given the extra overhead associated with it one could consider
sticking to one centralized state by default and switching to
distributed state if there is enough contention.

> > slapped around this, creating locking order read lock -> per-subset
> > write lock -- this will suffer scalability due to the read locking, but
> > it will still scale drastically better as apart from that there will be
> > no serialization. In this setting the problematic consumer will write
> > lock the new thing to stabilize the state.
> >
> > So my non-maintainer opinion is that the patchset is not worth it as it
> > fails to address anything for significantly more common and already
> > affected setups.
> This patch set is to reduce the remote access latency for insert/remove VMA
> in NUMA.
>

And I am saying the mmap semaphore is a significant problem already on
high-core no-numa setups. Addressing scalability in that case would
sort out the problem in your setup and to a significantly higher
extent.

> >
> > Have you looked into splitting the lock?
> >
> I ever tried.
>
> But there are two disadvantages:
> 1.) The traversal may need to hold many locks which makes the
> code very horrible.
>

I already above this is avoidable.

> 2.) Even we split the locks. Each lock protects a tree, when the tree becomes
> big enough, the VMA insert/remove will also become slow in NUMA.
> The reason is that the tree has VMAs in different NUMA nodes.
>

This is orthogonal to my proposal. In fact, if one is to pretend this
is never a factor with your patch, I would like to point out it will
remain not a factor if the per-numa struct gets its own lock.