Date:   Fri, 12 Jul 2019 12:25:17 -0400
From:   Nitesh Narayan Lal <nitesh@...hat.com>
To:     Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@...il.com>
Cc:     kvm list <kvm@...r.kernel.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>, lcapitulino@...hat.com,
        pagupta@...hat.com, wei.w.wang@...el.com,
        Yang Zhang <yang.zhang.wz@...il.com>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>,
        David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>,
        "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>, dodgen@...gle.com,
        Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@...cle.com>,
        dhildenb@...hat.com, Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
        john.starks@...rosoft.com, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...el.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC][Patch v11 1/2] mm: page_hinting: core infrastructure


On 7/12/19 12:22 PM, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 6:13 PM Nitesh Narayan Lal <nitesh@...hat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 7/11/19 7:20 PM, Alexander Duyck wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 10:58 AM Nitesh Narayan Lal <nitesh@...hat.com> wrote:
>>>> On 7/10/19 5:56 PM, Alexander Duyck wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 12:52 PM Nitesh Narayan Lal <nitesh@...hat.com> wrote:
>>>>>> This patch introduces the core infrastructure for free page hinting in
>>>>>> virtual environments. It enables the kernel to track the free pages which
>>>>>> can be reported to its hypervisor so that the hypervisor could
>>>>>> free and reuse that memory as per its requirement.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> While the pages are getting processed in the hypervisor (e.g.,
>>>>>> via MADV_FREE), the guest must not use them, otherwise, data loss
>>>>>> would be possible. To avoid such a situation, these pages are
>>>>>> temporarily removed from the buddy. The amount of pages removed
>>>>>> temporarily from the buddy is governed by the backend(virtio-balloon
>>>>>> in our case).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> To efficiently identify free pages that can to be hinted to the
>>>>>> hypervisor, bitmaps in a coarse granularity are used. Only fairly big
>>>>>> chunks are reported to the hypervisor - especially, to not break up THP
>>>>>> in the hypervisor - "MAX_ORDER - 2" on x86, and to save space. The bits
>>>>>> in the bitmap are an indication whether a page *might* be free, not a
>>>>>> guarantee. A new hook after buddy merging sets the bits.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Bitmaps are stored per zone, protected by the zone lock. A workqueue
>>>>>> asynchronously processes the bitmaps, trying to isolate and report pages
>>>>>> that are still free. The backend (virtio-balloon) is responsible for
>>>>>> reporting these batched pages to the host synchronously. Once reporting/
>>>>>> freeing is complete, isolated pages are returned back to the buddy.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There are still various things to look into (e.g., memory hotplug, more
>>>>>> efficient locking, possible races when disabling).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Signed-off-by: Nitesh Narayan Lal <nitesh@...hat.com>
>>> So just FYI, I thought I would try the patches. It looks like there
>>> might be a bug somewhere that is causing it to free memory it
>>> shouldn't be. After about 10 minutes my VM crashed with a system log
>>> full of various NULL pointer dereferences.
>> That's interesting, I have tried the patches with MADV_DONTNEED as well.
>> I just retried it but didn't see any crash. May I know what kind of
>> workload you are running?
> I was running the page_fault1 test on a VM with 80G of memory.
>
>>>  The only change I had made
>>> is to use MADV_DONTNEED instead of MADV_FREE in QEMU since my headers
>>> didn't have MADV_FREE on the host. It occurs to me one advantage of
>>> MADV_DONTNEED over MADV_FREE is that you are more likely to catch
>>> these sort of errors since it zeros the pages instead of leaving them
>>> intact.
>> For development purpose maybe. For the final patch-set I think we
>> discussed earlier why we should keep MADV_FREE.
> I'm still not convinced MADV_FREE is a net win, at least for
> performance. You are still paying the cost for the VMEXIT in order to
> regain ownership of the page. In the case that you are under memory
> pressure it is essentially equivalent to MADV_DONTNEED. Also it
> doesn't really do much to help with the memory footprint of the VM
> itself. With the MADV_DONTNEED the pages are freed back and you have a
> greater liklihood of reducing the overall memory footprint of the
> entire system since you would be more likely to be assigned pages that
> were recently used rather than having to access a cold page.	
>
> <snip>
>
>>>>>> +void page_hinting_enqueue(struct page *page, int order)
>>>>>> +{
>>>>>> +       int zone_idx;
>>>>>> +
>>>>>> +       if (!page_hitning_conf || order < PAGE_HINTING_MIN_ORDER)
>>>>>> +               return;
>>>>> I would think it is going to be expensive to be jumping into this
>>>>> function for every freed page. You should probably have an inline
>>>>> taking care of the order check before you even get here since it would
>>>>> be faster that way.
>>>> I see, I can take a look. Thanks.
>>>>>> +
>>>>>> +       bm_set_pfn(page);
>>>>>> +       if (atomic_read(&page_hinting_active))
>>>>>> +               return;
>>>>> So I would think this piece is racy. Specifically if you set a PFN
>>>>> that is somewhere below the PFN you are currently processing in your
>>>>> scan it is going to remain unset until you have another page freed
>>>>> after the scan is completed. I would worry you can end up with a batch
>>>>> free of memory resulting in a group of pages sitting at the start of
>>>>> your bitmap unhinted.
>>>> True, but that will be hinted next time threshold is met.
>>> Yes, but that assumes that there is another free immediately coming.
>>> It is possible that you have a big application run and then
>>> immediately shut down and have it free all its memory at once. Worst
>>> case scenario would be that it starts by freeing from the end and
>>> works toward the start. With that you could theoretically end up with
>>> a significant chunk of memory waiting some time for another big free
>>> to come along.
>> Any suggestion on some benchmark/test application which I could run to
>> see this kind of behavior?
> Like I mentioned before, try doing a VM with a bigger memory
> footprint. You could probably just do a stack of VMs like what we were
> doing with the memhog test. Basically the longer it takes to process
> all the pages the greater the liklihood that there are still pages
> left when they are freed.
Thanks. Before next posting I will make sure to test with a larger VM
(>64GB).
-- 
Thanks
Nitesh

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