Message-ID: <a1c9ba0f-544d-4204-ad3b-60fe1be2ab32@linux.alibaba.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2025 16:01:14 +0800
From: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@...ux.alibaba.com>
To: Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
 Lorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@...cle.com>,
 Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>, david@...hat.com, ziy@...dia.com,
 Liam.Howlett@...cle.com, npache@...hat.com, ryan.roberts@....com,
 dev.jain@....com, baohua@...nel.org, vbabka@...e.cz, rppt@...nel.org,
 surenb@...gle.com, mhocko@...e.com, linux-mm@...ck.org,
 linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] mm: fault in complete folios instead of individual
 pages for tmpfs



On 2025/7/16 04:03, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jul 2025, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 08, 2025 at 03:53:56PM +0800, Baolin Wang wrote:
>>> On 2025/7/7 21:33, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Jul 06, 2025 at 10:02:35AM +0800, Baolin Wang wrote:
>>>>> On 2025/7/5 06:18, Andrew Morton wrote:
>>>>>> On Fri,  4 Jul 2025 11:19:26 +0800 Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@...ux.alibaba.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> After commit acd7ccb284b8 ("mm: shmem: add large folio support for tmpfs"),
>>>>>>> tmpfs can also support large folio allocation (not just PMD-sized large
>>>>>>> folios).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> However, when accessing tmpfs via mmap(), although tmpfs supports large folios,
>>>>>>> we still establish mappings at the base page granularity, which is unreasonable.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> We can map multiple consecutive pages of a tmpfs folios at once according to
>>>>>>> the size of the large folio. On one hand, this can reduce the overhead of page
>>>>>>> faults; on the other hand, it can leverage hardware architecture optimizations
>>>>>>> to reduce TLB misses, such as contiguous PTEs on the ARM architecture.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Moreover, tmpfs mount will use the 'huge=' option to control large folio
>>>>>>> allocation explicitly. So it can be understood that the process's RSS statistics
>>>>>>> might increase, and I think this will not cause any obvious effects for users.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Performance test:
>>>>>>> I created a 1G tmpfs file, populated with 64K large folios, and write-accessed it
>>>>>>> sequentially via mmap(). I observed a significant performance improvement:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> That doesn't sound like a crazy thing to do.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Before the patch:
>>>>>>> real	0m0.158s
>>>>>>> user	0m0.008s
>>>>>>> sys	0m0.150s
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> After the patch:
>>>>>>> real	0m0.021s
>>>>>>> user	0m0.004s
>>>>>>> sys	0m0.017s
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And look at that.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> diff --git a/mm/memory.c b/mm/memory.c
>>>>>>> index 0f9b32a20e5b..9944380e947d 100644
>>>>>>> --- a/mm/memory.c
>>>>>>> +++ b/mm/memory.c
>>>>>>> @@ -5383,10 +5383,10 @@ vm_fault_t finish_fault(struct vm_fault *vmf)
>>>>>>>     	/*
>>>>>>>     	 * Using per-page fault to maintain the uffd semantics, and same
>>>>>>> -	 * approach also applies to non-anonymous-shmem faults to avoid
>>>>>>> +	 * approach also applies to non shmem/tmpfs faults to avoid
>>>>>>>     	 * inflating the RSS of the process.
>>>>>>>     	 */
>>>>>>> -	if (!vma_is_anon_shmem(vma) || unlikely(userfaultfd_armed(vma)) ||
>>>>>>> +	if (!vma_is_shmem(vma) || unlikely(userfaultfd_armed(vma)) ||
>>>>>>>     	    unlikely(needs_fallback)) {
>>>>>>>     		nr_pages = 1;
>>>>>>>     	} else if (nr_pages > 1) {
>>>>>>
>>>>>> and that's it?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm itching to get this into -stable, really.  What LTS user wouldn't
>>>>>> want this?
>>>>>
>>>>> This is an improvement rather than a bugfix, so I don't think it needs to go
>>>>> into LTS.
>>>>>
>>>>> Could it be viewed as correcting an oversight in
>>>>>> acd7ccb284b8?
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, I should have added this optimization in the series of the commit
>>>>> acd7ccb284b8. But obviously, I missed this :(.
>>>>
>>>> Buuut if this was an oversight for that patch that causes an unnecessary
>>>> perf degradation, surely this should have fixes tag + cc stable no?
>>>
>>> IMO, this commit acd7ccb284b8 won't cause perf degradation, instead it is
>>> used to introduce a new feature, while the current patch is a further
>>> reasonable optimization. As I mentioned, this is an improvement, not a
>>> bugfix or a patch to address performance regression.
>>
>> 4Well :) you say yourself it was an oversight, and it very clearly has a perf
>> _impact_, which if you compare backwards to acd7ccb284b8 is a degradation, but I
>> get your point.
>>
>> However, since you say 'oversight' this seems to me that you really meant to
>> have included it but hadn't noticed, and additionally, since it just seems to be
>> an unequivical good - let's maybe flip this round - why NOT backport it to
>> stable?
> 
> I strongly agree with Baolin: this patch is good, thank you, but it is
> a performance improvement, a new feature, not a candidate for the stable
> tree.  I'm surprised anyone thinks otherwise: Andrew, please delete that
> stable tag before advancing the patch from mm-unstable to mm-stable.
> 
> And the Fixee went into 6.14, so it couldn't go to 6.12 LTS anyway.

Agree.

> An unequivocal good? I'm not so sure.
> 
> I expect it ought to be limited, by fault_around_bytes (or suchlike).
> 
> If I understand all the mTHP versus large folio versus PMD-huge handling
> correctly (and of course I do not, I'm still weeks if not months away
> from understanding most of it), the old vma_is_anon_shmem() case would
> be limited by the shmem mTHP tunables, and one can reasonably argue that
> they would already take fault_around_bytes-like considerations into account;
> but the newly added file-written cases are governed by huge= mount options
> intended for PMD-size, but (currently) permitting all lesser orders.
> I don't think that mounting a tmpfs huge=always implies that mapping
> 256 PTEs for one fault is necessarily a good strategy.
> 
> But looking in the opposite direction, why is there now a vma_is_shmem()
> check there in finish_fault() at all?  If major filesystems are using
> large folios, why aren't they also allowed to benefit from mapping
> multiple PTEs at once (in this shared-writable case which the existing
> fault-around does not cover - I presume to avoid write amplification,
> but that's not an issue when the folio is large already).

This is what I'm going to do next. For other filesystems, I think they 
should also map multiple PTEs at once. IIUC, I don't think this will 
lead to write amplification (because large folios are already allocated, 
it will just cause RSS to inflate, but I wonder if this actually causes 
any problem?), instead the current dirty tracking for mmap write access 
is per-folio (see iomap_page_mkwrite()), which can cause write 
amplification.

> It's fine to advance cautiously, keeping this to shmem in coming release;
> but I think it should be extended soon (without any backport to stable),
> and consideration given to limiting it.

Yes, I will consider that. But fault_around_bytes is tricky, we can 
discuss it in subsequent patches. Thanks for your comments.

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