linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v3 00/20] Speculative page faults

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Date:   Thu, 28 Sep 2017 14:17:22 +0200
From:   Laurent Dufour <ldufour@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@...il.com>
Cc:     Paul McKenney <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>, kirill@...temov.name,
        Andi Kleen <ak@...ux.intel.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>, dave@...olabs.net,
        Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
        Michael Ellerman <mpe@...erman.id.au>,
        Paul Mackerras <paulus@...ba.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
        "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
        Will Deacon <will.deacon@....com>,
        Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@...il.com>,
        "linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>, haren@...ux.vnet.ibm.com,
        Anshuman Khandual <khandual@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        npiggin@...il.com, bsingharora@...il.com,
        Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@...ux.intel.com>,
        linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org, "x86@...nel.org" <x86@...nel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 00/20] Speculative page faults

Hi,

On 26/09/2017 01:34, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Sep 2017 09:27:43 -0700 Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@...il.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 12:15 AM, Laurent Dufour
>> <ldufour@...ux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>>> Despite the unprovable lockdep warning raised by Sergey, I didn't get any
>>> feedback on this series.
>>>
>>> Is there a chance to get it moved upstream ?
>>
>> what is the status ?
>> We're eagerly looking forward for this set to land,
>> since we have several use cases for tracing that
>> will build on top of this set as discussed at Plumbers.
> 
> There has been sadly little review and testing so far :(

I do agree and I could just encourage people to do so :/

> I'll be taking a close look at it all over the next couple of weeks.

Thanks Andrew for giving it a close look.

> One terribly important thing (especially for a patchset this large and
> intrusive) is the rationale for merging it: the justification, usually
> in the form of end-user benefit.

The benefit is only for multi-threaded processes. But even on *small* 
systems with 16 CPUs, there is a real benefit.

> 
> Laurent's [0/n] provides some nice-looking performance benefits for
> workloads which are chosen to show performance benefits(!) but, alas,
> no quantitative testing results for workloads which we may suspect will
> be harmed by the changes(?).

I did test with kernbench, involving gcc/ld which are not 
multi-threaded, AFAIK, and I didn't see any impact.
But if you know additional test I should give a try, please advise.

Regarding ebizzy, it was designed to simulate web server's activity, so 
I guess there will be improvements when running real web servers.

>  Even things as simple as impact upon
> single-threaded pagefault-intensive workloads and its effect upon
> CONFIG_SMP=n .text size?
> 
> If you have additional usecases then please, spell them out for us in
> full detail so we can better understand the benefits which this
> patchset provides.

The other use-case I'm aware of is on memory database, where performance 
improvements is really significant, as I mentioned in the header of my 
series.

Cheers,
Laurent.