Date:   Fri, 24 Sep 2021 12:05:24 +0200
From:   David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>
To:     Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
        Axel Rasmussen <axelrasmussen@...gle.com>,
        Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
        Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm/khugepaged: Detecting uffd-wp vma more efficiently

On 22.09.21 20:58, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 08:21:40PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> On 22.09.21 19:51, Peter Xu wrote:
>>> We forbid merging thps for uffd-wp enabled regions, by breaking the khugepaged
>>> scanning right after we detected a uffd-wp armed pte (either present, or swap).
>>>
>>> It works, but it's less efficient, because those ptes only exist for VM_UFFD_WP
>>> enabled VMAs.  Checking against the vma flag would be more efficient, and good
>>> enough.  To be explicit, we could still be able to merge some thps for
>>> VM_UFFD_WP regions before this patch as long as they have zero uffd-wp armed
>>> ptes, however that's not a major target for thp collapse anyways.
>>>
>>
>> Hm, are we sure there are no users that could benefit from the current
>> handling?
>>
>> I'm thinking about long-term uffd-wp users that effectively end up wp-ing on
>> only a small fraction of a gigantic vma, or always wp complete blocks in a
>> certain granularity in the range of THP.
> 
> Yes, that's a good question.
> 
>>
>> Databases come to mind ...
> 
> One thing to mention is that this patch didn't forbid thp being used within a
> uffd-wp-ed range.  E.g., we still allow thp exist, we can uffd-wp a thp and
> it'll split only until when the thp is written.
> 
> While what this patch does is it stops khugepaged from proactively merging
> those small pages into thps as long as VM_UFFD_WP|VM_UFFD_MINOR is set.  It may
> still affect some user, but it's not a complete disable on thp.
> 
>>
>> In the past, I played with the idea of using uffd-wp to protect access to
>> logically unplugged memory regions part of virtio-mem devices in QEMU --
>> which would exactly do something as described above. But I'll most probably
>> be using ordinary uffd once any users that might read such logically
>> unplugged memory have been "fixed".
> 
> Yes, even if you'd like to keep using uffd-wp that sounds like a very
> reasonable scenario.
> 
>>
>> The change itself looks sane to me AFAIKT.
> 
> So one major motivation of this patch of mine is to prepare for shmem, because
> the old commit obviously only covered anonymous.
> 
> But after a 2nd thought, I just noticed shmem shouldn't have a problem with
> khugepaged merging at all!
> 
> The thing is, when khugepaged is merging a shmem thp, unlike anonymous, it'll
> not merge the ptes into a pmd, but it'll simply zap the ptes.  It means all
> uffd-wp tracking information won't be lost even if merging happened, those info
> will still be kept inside pgtables using (the upcoming) pte markers.
> 
> When faulted, we'll just do small page mappings while it won't stop the shmem
> thp from being mapped hugely in other mm, afaict.
> 
> With that in mind, indeed I see this patch less necessary to be merged; so for
> sparsely wr-protected vmas like virtio-mem we can still keep some of the ranges
> mergeable, that sounds a good thing to keep it as-is.
> 
> NACK myself for now: let's not lose that good property of both thp+uffd-wp so
> easily, and I'll think more of it.
> 

Thanks for the insights, shmem THP is still mostly unexplored territory 
on my end :)

-- 
Thanks,

David / dhildenb

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