linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v7] mm: Add PM_THP

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Date:   Tue, 4 Jan 2022 15:04:31 -0800
From:   Mina Almasry <almasrymina@...gle.com>
To:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
Cc:     Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>,
        "Paul E . McKenney" <paulmckrcu@...com>,
        Yu Zhao <yuzhao@...gle.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>,
        Ivan Teterevkov <ivan.teterevkov@...anix.com>,
        Florian Schmidt <florian.schmidt@...anix.com>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-doc@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v7] mm: Add PM_THP_MAPPED to /proc/pid/pagemap

On Mon, Dec 13, 2021 at 4:22 PM Mina Almasry <almasrymina@...gle.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 8:10 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 04:01:02PM -0800, Mina Almasry wrote:
> > > Add PM_THP_MAPPED MAPPING to allow userspace to detect whether a given virt
> > > address is currently mapped by a transparent huge page or not.  Example
> > > use case is a process requesting THPs from the kernel (via a huge tmpfs
> > > mount for example), for a performance critical region of memory.  The
> > > userspace may want to query whether the kernel is actually backing this
> > > memory by hugepages or not.
> >
> > But what is userspace going to _do_ differently if the kernel hasn't
> > backed the memory with huge pages?
>
> Sorry for the late reply here.
>
> My plan is to expose this information as metrics right now and:
> 1. Understand the kind of hugepage backing we're actually getting if any.
> 2. If there are drops in hugepage backing we can investigate the
> cause, whether it's due to normal memory fragmentation or some
> bug/issue.
> 3. Schedule machines for reboots to defragment the memory if the
> hugepage backing is too low.
> 4. Possibly motivate future work to improve hugepage backing if our
> numbers are too low.

Friendly ping on this. It has been reviewed by a few folks and after
Matthew had questions about the use case which I've answered in the
email above. Matthew, are you opposed to this patch?