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Message-ID: <20210105092037.GY13207@dhcp22.suse.cz>
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2021 10:20:37 +0100
From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
To: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...el.com>
Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>,
Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@...ux.intel.com>,
Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>,
Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>,
"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>,
Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com>,
Liang Li <liliangleo@...iglobal.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: [RFC v2 PATCH 4/4] mm: pre zero out free pages to speed up page
allocation for __GFP_ZERO
On Mon 04-01-21 15:00:31, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On 1/4/21 12:11 PM, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> >> Yeah, it certainly can't be the default, but it *is* useful for
> >> thing where we know that there are no cache benefits to zeroing
> >> close to where the memory is allocated.
> >>
> >> The trick is opting into it somehow, either in a process or a VMA.
> >>
> > The patch set is mostly trying to optimize starting a new process. So
> > process/vma doesnât really work.
>
> Let's say you have a system-wide tunable that says: pre-zero pages and
> keep 10GB of them around. Then, you opt-in a process to being allowed
> to dip into that pool with a process-wide flag or an madvise() call.
> You could even have the flag be inherited across execve() if you wanted
> to have helper apps be able to set the policy and access the pool like
> how numactl works.
While possible, it sounds quite heavy weight to me. Page allocator would
have to somehow maintain those pre-zeroed pages. This pool will also
become a very scarce resource very soon because everybody just want to
run faster. So this would open many more interesting questions.
A global knob with all or nothing sounds like an easier to use and
maintain solution to me.
> Dan makes a very good point about using filesystems for this, though.
> It wouldn't be rocket science to set up a special tmpfs mount just for
> VM memory and pre-zero it from userspace. For qemu, you'd need to teach
> the management layer to hand out zeroed files via mem-path=.
Agreed. That would be an interesting option.
> Heck, if
> you taught MADV_FREE how to handle tmpfs, you could even pre-zero *and*
> get the memory back quickly if those files ended up over-sized somehow.
We can probably allow MADV_FREE on shmem but that would require an
exclusively mapped page. Shared case is really tricky because of silent
data corruption in uncoordinated userspace.
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
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