linux-kernel - Re: missing madvise functionality

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Date:	Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:10:14 +0200
From:	Eric Dumazet <dada1@...mosbay.com>
To:	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>
CC:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Ulrich Drepper <drepper@...hat.com>,
	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>,
	Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Jakub Jelinek <jakub@...hat.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	Hugh Dickins <hugh@...itas.com>
Subject: Re: missing madvise functionality

Rik van Riel a écrit :
> Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
>> Oh.  I was assuming that we'd want to unmap these pages from 
>> pagetables and
>> mark then super-easily-reclaimable.  So a later touch would incur a minor
>> fault.
>>
>> But you think that we should leave them mapped into pagetables so no such
>> fault occurs.
> 
>> Leaving the pages mapped into pagetables means that they are considerably
>> less likely to be reclaimed.
> 
> If we move the pages to a place where they are very likely to be
> reclaimed quickly (end of the inactive list, or a separate
> reclaim list) and clear the dirty and referenced lists, we can
> both reclaim the page easily *and* avoid the page fault penalty.
> 

There is one possible speedup :

- If an user app does a madvise(MADV_DONTNEED), we can assume the pages can 
later be bring back without need to zero them. The application doesnt care.

A page fault is not that expensive. But clearing N*PAGE_SIZE bytes is, because 
it potentially evicts a large part of CPU cache.

If I recall well, mysql bench Ulrich mentioned was allocating/freeing large 
areas (100 Kbytes or so) in a loop.

mmap()/brk() must give fresh NULL pages, but maybe madvise(MADV_DONTNEED) can 
relax this requirement (if the pages were reclaimed, then a page fault could 
bring a new page with random content)

-
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