linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/5] Alternative mTHP swap allocator improvements

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Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2024 10:17:56 +0100
From: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@....com>
To: Barry Song <baohua@...nel.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>, Chris Li <chrisl@...nel.org>,
 Kairui Song <kasong@...cent.com>, "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@...el.com>,
 Kalesh Singh <kaleshsingh@...gle.com>, Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
 David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
 linux-mm@...ck.org, Shuai Yuan <yuanshuai@...o.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/5] Alternative mTHP swap allocator improvements

On 19/06/2024 10:11, Barry Song wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 11:27 AM Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@....com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Chris has been doing great work at [1] to clean up my mess in the mTHP swap
>> entry allocator. But Barry posted a test program and results at [2] showing that
>> even with Chris's changes, there are still some fallbacks (around 5% - 25% in
>> some cases). I was interested in why that might be and ended up putting this PoC
>> patch set together to try to get a better understanding. This series ends up
>> achieving 0% fallback, even with small folios ("-s") enabled. I haven't done
>> much testing beyond that (yet) but thought it was worth posting on the strength
>> of that result alone.
>>
>> At a high level this works in a similar way to Chris's series; it marks a
>> cluster as being for a particular order and if a new cluster cannot be allocated
>> then it scans through the existing non-full clusters. But it does it by scanning
>> through the clusters rather than assembling them into a list. Cluster flags are
>> used to mark clusters that have been scanned and are known not to have enough
>> contiguous space, so the efficiency should be similar in practice.
>>
>> Because its not based around a linked list, there is less churn and I'm
>> wondering if this is perhaps easier to review and potentially even get into
>> v6.10-rcX to fix up what's already there, rather than having to wait until v6.11
>> for Chris's series? I know Chris has a larger roadmap of improvements, so at
>> best I see this as a tactical fix that will ultimately be superseeded by Chris's
>> work.
>>
>> There are a few differences to note vs Chris's series:
>>
>> - order-0 fallback scanning is still allowed in any cluster; the argument in the
>>   past was that swap should always use all the swap space, so I've left this
>>   mechanism in. It is only a fallback though; first the the new per-order
>>   scanner is invoked, even for order-0, so if there are free slots in clusters
>>   already assigned for order-0, then the allocation will go there.
>>
>> - CPUs can steal slots from other CPU's current clusters; those clusters remain
>>   scannable while they are current for a CPU and are only made unscannable when
>>   no more CPUs are scanning that particular cluster.
>>
>> - I'm preferring to allocate a free cluster ahead of per-order scanning, since,
>>   as I understand it, the original intent of a per-cpu current cluster was to
>>   get pages for an application adjacent in the swap to speed up IO.
>>
>> I'd be keen to hear if you think we could get something like this into v6.10 to
>> fix the mess - I'm willing to work quickly to address comments and do more
>> testing. If not, then this is probably just a distraction and we should
>> concentrate on Chris's series.
> 
> Ryan, thank you very much for accomplishing this.
> 
> I am getting Shuai Yuan's (CC'd) help to collect the latency histogram of
> add_to_swap() for both your approach and Chris's. I will update you with
> the results ASAP.

Ahh great - look forward to the results!

> 
> I am also anticipating Chris's V3, as V1 seems quite stable, but V2 has
> caused a couple of crashes.
> 
>>
>> This applies on top of v6.10-rc4.
>>
>> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20240614-swap-allocator-v2-0-2a513b4a7f2f@kernel.org/
>> [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20240615084714.37499-1-21cnbao@gmail.com/
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ryan
>>
>> Ryan Roberts (5):
>>   mm: swap: Simplify end-of-cluster calculation
>>   mm: swap: Change SWAP_NEXT_INVALID to highest value
>>   mm: swap: Track allocation order for clusters
>>   mm: swap: Scan for free swap entries in allocated clusters
>>   mm: swap: Optimize per-order cluster scanning
>>
>>  include/linux/swap.h |  18 +++--
>>  mm/swapfile.c        | 164 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----
>>  2 files changed, 157 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)
>>
>> --
>> 2.43.0
>>
> 
> Thanks
> Barry