Message-ID: <2513a63d-b11a-48fc-922a-288785817df4@redhat.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2025 10:22:47 +0200
From: David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>
To: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@...ux.alibaba.com>,
 Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>, Lorenzo Stoakes
 <lorenzo.stoakes@...cle.com>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>, 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 17.07.25 10:01, Baolin Wang wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

I recall [1]. But that would, of course, only affect the RSS of a 
program and not the actual memory consumption (the large folio resides 
in memory ...).

The comments in the code spells that out: "inflating the RSS of the 
process."

[1] https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=000019017

-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb

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