Message-ID: <f5777eeb-6ae2-623a-8639-450e88529f18@intel.com>
Date:   Fri, 17 Mar 2023 21:44:55 +0800
From:   "Yin, Fengwei" <fengwei.yin@...el.com>
To:     Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@....com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
CC:     <linux-arch@...r.kernel.org>, <will@...nel.org>,
        <linux-mm@...ck.org>, <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 35/36] mm: Convert do_set_pte() to set_pte_range()



On 3/17/2023 9:00 PM, Ryan Roberts wrote:
> On 17/03/2023 08:19, Yin, Fengwei wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 3/17/2023 4:00 PM, Ryan Roberts wrote:
>>> On 17/03/2023 06:33, Yin, Fengwei wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 3/17/2023 11:44 AM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>>>>> On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 09:58:17AM +0800, Yin, Fengwei wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 3/17/2023 1:52 AM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>>>>>>> On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 04:38:58PM +0000, Ryan Roberts wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 16/03/2023 16:23, Yin, Fengwei wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> I think you are changing behavior here - is this intentional? Previously this
>>>>>>>>>> would be evaluated per page, now its evaluated once for the whole range. The
>>>>>>>>>> intention below is that directly faulted pages are mapped young and prefaulted
>>>>>>>>>> pages are mapped old. But now a whole range will be mapped the same.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Yes. You are right here.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Look at the prefault and cpu_has_hw_af for ARM64, it looks like we
>>>>>>>>> can avoid to handle vmf->address == addr specially. It's OK to 
>>>>>>>>> drop prefault and change the logic here a little bit to:
>>>>>>>>>   if (arch_wants_old_prefaulted_pte())
>>>>>>>>>       entry = pte_mkold(entry);
>>>>>>>>>   else
>>>>>>>>>       entry = pte_sw_mkyong(entry);
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> It's not necessary to use pte_sw_mkyong for vmf->address == addr
>>>>>>>>> because HW will set the ACCESS bit in page table entry.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Add Will Deacon in case I missed something here. Thanks.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I'll defer to Will's response, but not all arm HW supports HW access flag
>>>>>>>> management. In that case it's done by SW, so I would imagine that by setting
>>>>>>>> this to old initially, we will get a second fault to set the access bit, which
>>>>>>>> will slow things down. I wonder if you will need to split this into (up to) 3
>>>>>>>> calls to set_ptes()?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I don't think we should do that.  The limited information I have from
>>>>>>> various microarchitectures is that the PTEs must differ only in their
>>>>>>> PFN bits in order to use larger TLB entries.  That includes the Accessed
>>>>>>> bit (or equivalent).  So we should mkyoung all the PTEs in the same
>>>>>>> folio, at least initially.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> That said, we should still do this conditionally.  We'll prefault some
>>>>>>> other folios too.  So I think this should be:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>         bool prefault = (addr > vmf->address) || ((addr + nr) < vmf->address);
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> According to commit 46bdb4277f98e70d0c91f4289897ade533fe9e80, if hardware access
>>>>>> flag is supported on ARM64, there is benefit if prefault PTEs is set as "old".
>>>>>> If we change prefault like above, the PTEs is set as "yong" which loose benefit
>>>>>> on ARM64 with hardware access flag.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ITOH, if from "old" to "yong" is cheap, why not leave all PTEs of folio as "old"
>>>>>> and let hardware to update it to "yong"?
>>>>>
>>>>> Because we're tracking the entire folio as a single entity.  So we're
>>>>> better off avoiding the extra pagefaults to update the accessed bit,
>>>>> which won't actually give us any information (vmscan needs to know "were
>>>>> any of the accessed bits set", not "how many of them were set").
>>>> There is no extra pagefaults to update the accessed bit. There are three cases here:
>>>> 1. hardware support access flag and cheap from "old" to "yong" without extra fault
>>>> 2. hardware support access flag and expensive from "old" to "yong" without extra fault
>>>> 3. no hardware support access flag (extra pagefaults from "old" to "yong". Expensive)
>>>>
>>>> For #2 and #3, it's expensive from "old" to "yong", so we always set PTEs "yong" in
>>>> page fault.
>>>> For #1, It's cheap from "old" to "yong", so it's OK to set PTEs "old" in page fault.
>>>> And hardware will set it to "yong" when access memory. Actually, ARM64 with hardware
>>>> access bit requires to set PTEs "old".
>>>
>>> Your logic makes sense, but it doesn't take into account the HPA
>>> micro-architectural feature present in some ARM CPUs. HPA can transparently
>>> coalesce multiple pages into a single TLB entry when certain conditions are met
>>> (roughly; upto 4 pages physically and virtually contiguous and all within a
>>> 4-page natural alignment). But as Matthew says, this works out better when all
>>> pte attributes (including access and dirty) match. Given the reason for setting
>>> the prefault pages to old is so that vmscan can do a better job of finding cold
>>> pages, and given vmscan will now be looking for folios and not individual pages
>>> (I assume?), I agree with Matthew that we should make whole folios young or old.
>>> It will marginally increase our chances of the access and dirty bits being
>>> consistent across the whole 4-page block that the HW tries to coalesce. If we
>>> unconditionally make everything old, the hw will set accessed for the single
>>> page that faulted, and we therefore don't have consistency for that 4-page block.
>> My concern was that the benefit of "old" PTEs for ARM64 with hardware access bit
>> will be lost. The workloads (application launch latency and direct reclaim according
>> to commit 46bdb4277f98e70d0c91f4289897ade533fe9e80) can show regression with this
>> series. Thanks.
> 
> My (potentially incorrect) understanding of the reason that marking the
> prefaulted ptes as old was because it made it easier/quicker for vmscan to
> identify those prefaulted pages and reclaim them under memory pressure. I
> _assume_ now that we have large folios, that vmscan will be trying to pick
> folios for reclaim, not individual subpages within the folio? In which case,
> vmscan will only consider the folio as old if _all_ pages within are old. So
> marking all the pages of a folio young vs marking 1 page in the folio young
> won't make a difference from this perspective. But it will make a difference
> from the perspective a HPA. (Please Matthew or somebody else, correct me if my
> understanding is incorrect!)
Thanks a lot for your patient explanation. I got the point here. For the first
access, we mark the all PTEs of folio "yong". So later access will get large TLB.


Regards
Yin, Fengwei

> 
>>
>> BTW, with TLB merge feature, should hardware update coalesce multiple pages access
>> bit together? otherwise, it's avoidable that only one page access is set by hardware
>> finally.
> 
> No, the HW will only update the access flag for the single page that is
> accessed. So yes, in the long run the value of the flags across the 4-page block
> will diverge - that's why I said "marginal" above.
> 
>>
>> Regards
>> Yin, Fengwei
>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Anyway, hopefully Ryan can test this and let us know if it fixes the
>>>>> regression he sees.
>>>> I highly suspect the regression Ryan saw is not related with this but another my
>>>> stupid work. I will send out the testing patch soon. Thanks.
>>>
>>> I tested a version of this where I made everything unconditionally young,
>>> thinking it might be the source of the perf regression, before I reported it. It
>>> doesn't make any difference. So I agree the regression is somewhere else.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Ryan
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Regards
>>>> Yin, Fengwei
>>>
> 

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