linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH RFC 0/4] mm/ksm: add option to automerge VMAs

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Date:   Tue, 14 May 2019 15:33:18 +0200
From:   Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@...hat.com>
To:     Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@...tuozzo.com>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Pavel Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@...een.com>,
        Timofey Titovets <nefelim4ag@...il.com>,
        Aaron Tomlin <atomlin@...hat.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 0/4] mm/ksm: add option to automerge VMAs

Hi.

On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 12:12:16PM +0300, Kirill Tkhai wrote:
> > Immediate question: what should be actually done on this? I see 2
> > options:
> > 
> > 1) mark all VMAs as mergeable + set some flag for mmap() to mark all
> > further allocations as mergeable as well;
> > 2) just mark all the VMAs as mergeable; userspace can call this
> > periodically to mark new VMAs.
> > 
> > My prediction is that 2) is less destructive, and the decision is
> > preserved predominantly to userspace, thus it would be a desired option.
> 
> Let's see, how we use KSM now. It's good for virtual machines: people
> install the same distribution in several VMs, and they have the same
> packages and the same files. When you read a file inside VM, its pages
> are file cache for the VM, but they are anonymous pages for host kernel.
> 
> Hypervisor marks VM memory as mergeable, and host KSM merges the same
> anonymous pages together. Many of file cache inside VM is constant
> content, so we have good KSM compression on such the file pages.
> The result we have is explainable and expected.

Yup, correct.

> But we don't know anything about pages, you have merged on your laptop.
> We can't make any assumptions before analysis of applications, which
> produce such the pages. Let's check what happens before we try to implement
> some specific design (if we really need something to implement).
> 
> The rest is just technical details. We may implement everything we need
> on top of this (even implement a polling of /proc/[pid]/maps and write
> a task and address of vma to force_madvise or similar file).

I'm not sure that reviewing all the applications falls under the scope
of this and/or similar submission. Personally I do not feel comfortable
reviewing Firefox code, for example.

But I do run 2 instances of FF, one for work stuff, one for personal stuff,
so merging its memory would be definitely beneficial for me. I believe I'm
not the only one doing this, and things are not limited to Firefox only, of
course.

Please consider checking a v2 submission I've just posted. It implements
your suggestion on "force_madvise" knob, and I find your feedback very
relevant and useful.

Thanks.

-- 
  Best regards,
    Oleksandr Natalenko (post-factum)
    Senior Software Maintenance Engineer