linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 0/6] prohibit pinning pages in ZONE

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Message-ID: <593822e5-4e1a-fdca-5500-4138d0f2b728@redhat.com>
Date:   Fri, 4 Dec 2020 19:01:58 +0100
From:   David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>
To:     Pavel Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@...een.com>,
        Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@...pe.ca>
Cc:     Joonsoo Kim <js1304@...il.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>,
        Oscar Salvador <osalvador@...e.de>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>,
        Sasha Levin <sashal@...nel.org>,
        Tyler Hicks <tyhicks@...ux.microsoft.com>,
        mike.kravetz@...cle.com, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
        John Hubbard <jhubbard@...dia.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] prohibit pinning pages in ZONE_MOVABLE

On 04.12.20 18:50, Pavel Tatashin wrote:
>>> Yes, this indeed could be a problem for some configurations. I will
>>> add your comment to the commit log of one of the patches.
>>
>> It sounds like there is some inherent tension here, breaking THP's
>> when doing pin_user_pages() is a really nasty thing to do. DMA
>> benefits greatly from THP.
>>
>> I know nothing about ZONE_MOVABLE, is this auto-setup or an admin
>> option? If the result of this patch is standard systems can no longer
>> pin > 80% of their memory I have some regression concerns..
> 
> ZONE_MOVABLE can be configured via kernel parameter, or when memory
> nodes are onlined after hot-add; so this is something that admins
> configure. ZONE_MOVABLE is designed to gurantee memory hot-plug
> functionality, and not availability of THP, however, I did not know
> about the use case where some admins might configure ZONE_MOVABLE to
> increase availability of THP because pages are always migratable in
> them. The thing is, if we fragment ZONE_MOVABLE by pinning pages in
> it, the availability of THP also suffers.  We can migrate pages in
> ZONE_NORMAL, just not guaranteed, so we can create THP in ZONE_NORMAL
> as well, which is the usual case.

Right, we should document this at some place to make admins aware of
this. Something like

"Techniques that rely on long-term pinnings of memory (especially, RDMA
and vfio) are fundamentally problematic with ZONE_MOVABLE and,
therefore, memory hotunplug. Pinned pages cannot reside on ZONE_MOVABLE,
to guarantee that memory can still get hotunplugged - be aware that
pinning can fail even if there is plenty of free memory in ZONE_MOVABLE.
In addition, using ZONE_MOVABLE might make page pinning more expensive,
because pages have to be migrated off that zone first."

BTW, you might also want to update the comment for ZONE_MOVABLE in
include/linux/mmzone.h at the end of this series, removing the special
case of pinned pages (1.) and maybe adding what happens when trying to
pin pages on ZONE_MOVABLE.

-- 
Thanks,

David / dhildenb