linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH V3] mm: compaction: skip memory compaction when there are not enough migratable pages

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-ID: <20250113154657.GA829144@cmpxchg.org>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2025 10:46:57 -0500
From: Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>
To: yangge1116@....com
Cc: akpm@...ux-foundation.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, 21cnbao@...il.com, david@...hat.com,
	baolin.wang@...ux.alibaba.com, liuzixing@...on.cn,
	Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>
Subject: Re: [PATCH V3] mm: compaction: skip memory compaction when there are
 not enough migratable pages

CC Vlastimil

On Wed, Jan 08, 2025 at 07:30:54PM +0800, yangge1116@....com wrote:
> From: yangge <yangge1116@....com>
> 
> There are 4 NUMA nodes on my machine, and each NUMA node has 32GB
> of memory. I have configured 16GB of CMA memory on each NUMA node,
> and starting a 32GB virtual machine with device passthrough is
> extremely slow, taking almost an hour.
> 
> During the start-up of the virtual machine, it will call
> pin_user_pages_remote(..., FOLL_LONGTERM, ...) to allocate memory.
> Long term GUP cannot allocate memory from CMA area, so a maximum of
> 16 GB of no-CMA memory on a NUMA node can be used as virtual machine
> memory. There is 16GB of free CMA memory on a NUMA node, which is
> sufficient to pass the order-0 watermark check, causing the
> __compaction_suitable() function to  consistently return true.
> However, if there aren't enough migratable pages available, performing
> memory compaction is also meaningless. Besides checking whether
> the order-0 watermark is met, __compaction_suitable() also needs
> to determine whether there are sufficient migratable pages available
> for memory compaction.
> 
> For costly allocations, because __compaction_suitable() always
> returns true, __alloc_pages_slowpath() can't exit at the appropriate
> place, resulting in excessively long virtual machine startup times.
> Call trace:
> __alloc_pages_slowpath
>     if (compact_result == COMPACT_SKIPPED ||
>         compact_result == COMPACT_DEFERRED)
>         goto nopage; // should exit __alloc_pages_slowpath() from here
> 
> When the 16G of non-CMA memory on a single node is exhausted, we will
> fallback to allocating memory on other nodes. In order to quickly
> fallback to remote nodes, we should skip memory compaction when
> migratable pages are insufficient. After this fix, it only takes a
> few tens of seconds to start a 32GB virtual machine with device
> passthrough functionality.
> 
> Signed-off-by: yangge <yangge1116@....com>
> ---
> 
> V3:
> - fix build error
> 
> V2:
> - consider unevictable folios
> 
>  mm/compaction.c | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/mm/compaction.c b/mm/compaction.c
> index 07bd227..a9f1261 100644
> --- a/mm/compaction.c
> +++ b/mm/compaction.c
> @@ -2383,7 +2383,27 @@ static bool __compaction_suitable(struct zone *zone, int order,
>  				  int highest_zoneidx,
>  				  unsigned long wmark_target)
>  {
> +	pg_data_t __maybe_unused *pgdat = zone->zone_pgdat;
> +	unsigned long sum, nr_pinned;
>  	unsigned long watermark;
> +
> +	sum = node_page_state(pgdat, NR_INACTIVE_FILE) +
> +		node_page_state(pgdat, NR_INACTIVE_ANON) +
> +		node_page_state(pgdat, NR_ACTIVE_FILE) +
> +		node_page_state(pgdat, NR_ACTIVE_ANON) +
> +		node_page_state(pgdat, NR_UNEVICTABLE);

What about PAGE_MAPPING_MOVABLE pages that aren't on this list? For
example, zsmalloc backend pages can be a large share of allocated
memory, and they are compactable. You would give up on compaction
prematurely and cause unnecessary allocation failures.

That scenario is way more common than the one you're trying to fix.

I think trying to make this list complete, and maintaining it, is
painstaking and error prone. And errors are hard to detect: they will
just manifest as spurious failures in higher order requests that you'd
need to catch with tracing enabled in the right moments.

So I'm not a fan of this approach.

Compaction is already skipped when previous runs were not successful.
See defer_compaction() and compaction_deferred(). Why is this not
helping here?

> +	nr_pinned = node_page_state(pgdat, NR_FOLL_PIN_ACQUIRED) -
> +		node_page_state(pgdat, NR_FOLL_PIN_RELEASED);

Likewise, as Barry notes, not all pinned pages are necessarily LRU
pages. remap_vmalloc_range() pages come to mind. You can't do subset
math on potentially disjunct sets.

> +	/*
> +	 * Gup-pinned pages are non-migratable. After subtracting these pages,
> +	 * we need to check if the remaining pages are sufficient for memory
> +	 * compaction.
> +	 */
> +	if ((sum - nr_pinned) < (1 << order))
> +		return false;
> +