linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v8 0/7] mm / virtio: Provide support for unused page reporting

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Date:   Fri, 6 Sep 2019 20:15:20 -0700
From:   Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@...il.com>
To:     "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>
Cc:     Nitesh Narayan Lal <nitesh@...hat.com>,
        kvm list <kvm@...r.kernel.org>,
        David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...el.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        virtio-dev@...ts.oasis-open.org,
        Oscar Salvador <osalvador@...e.de>,
        Yang Zhang <yang.zhang.wz@...il.com>,
        Pankaj Gupta <pagupta@...hat.com>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>,
        Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@...cle.com>,
        lcapitulino@...hat.com, "Wang, Wei W" <wei.w.wang@...el.com>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
        Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>,
        Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@...ux.intel.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v8 0/7] mm / virtio: Provide support for unused page reporting

On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 8:23 AM Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@...hat.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 07:53:21AM -0700, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> > This series provides an asynchronous means of reporting to a hypervisor
> > that a guest page is no longer in use and can have the data associated
> > with it dropped. To do this I have implemented functionality that allows
> > for what I am referring to as unused page reporting
> >
> > The functionality for this is fairly simple. When enabled it will allocate
> > statistics to track the number of reported pages in a given free area.
> > When the number of free pages exceeds this value plus a high water value,
> > currently 32, it will begin performing page reporting which consists of
> > pulling pages off of free list and placing them into a scatter list. The
> > scatterlist is then given to the page reporting device and it will perform
> > the required action to make the pages "reported", in the case of
> > virtio-balloon this results in the pages being madvised as MADV_DONTNEED
> > and as such they are forced out of the guest. After this they are placed
> > back on the free list, and an additional bit is added if they are not
> > merged indicating that they are a reported buddy page instead of a
> > standard buddy page. The cycle then repeats with additional non-reported
> > pages being pulled until the free areas all consist of reported pages.
> >
> > I am leaving a number of things hard-coded such as limiting the lowest
> > order processed to PAGEBLOCK_ORDER, and have left it up to the guest to
> > determine what the limit is on how many pages it wants to allocate to
> > process the hints. The upper limit for this is based on the size of the
> > queue used to store the scattergather list.
>
> I queued this  so this gets tested on linux-next but the mm core changes
> need acks from appropriate people.

Looks like there was a couple issues on arm64 and ia64 architectures.
I believe I have those fixed up and will submit a v9 in the morning
after my test runs have completed.

Thanks.

- Alex