linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: Enable khugepaged to operate on non-writable VMAs

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Message-ID: <759bff7a-3918-41ac-a184-8c07ec414bb2@redhat.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2025 10:13:35 +0200
From: David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>
To: Wei Yang <richard.weiyang@...il.com>, Dev Jain <dev.jain@....com>
Cc: akpm@...ux-foundation.org, kas@...nel.org, willy@...radead.org,
 hughd@...gle.com, ziy@...dia.com, baolin.wang@...ux.alibaba.com,
 lorenzo.stoakes@...cle.com, Liam.Howlett@...cle.com, npache@...hat.com,
 ryan.roberts@....com, baohua@...nel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
 linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: Enable khugepaged to operate on non-writable VMAs

On 03.09.25 10:08, Wei Yang wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 03, 2025 at 11:16:34AM +0530, Dev Jain wrote:
>> Currently khugepaged does not collapse a region which does not have a
>> single writable page. This is wasteful since non-writable VMAs mapped by
>> the application won't benefit from THP collapse. Therefore, remove this
>> restriction and allow khugepaged to collapse a VMA with arbitrary
>> protections.
>>
>> Along with this, currently MADV_COLLAPSE does not perform a collapse on a
>> non-writable VMA, and this restriction is nowhere to be found on the
>> manpage - the restriction itself sounds wrong to me since the user knows
>> the protection of the memory it has mapped, so collapsing read-only
>> memory via madvise() should be a choice of the user which shouldn't
>> be overriden by the kernel.
>>
>> On an arm64 machine, an average of 5% improvement is seen on some mmtests
>> benchmarks, particularly hackbench, with a maximum improvement of 12%.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Dev Jain <dev.jain@....com>
>> ---
> [...]
>> mm/khugepaged.c | 9 ++-------
>> 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/mm/khugepaged.c b/mm/khugepaged.c
>> index 4ec324a4c1fe..a0f1df2a7ae6 100644
>> --- a/mm/khugepaged.c
>> +++ b/mm/khugepaged.c
>> @@ -676,9 +676,7 @@ static int __collapse_huge_page_isolate(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
>> 			writable = true;
>> 	}
>>
>> -	if (unlikely(!writable)) {
>> -		result = SCAN_PAGE_RO;
>> -	} else if (unlikely(cc->is_khugepaged && !referenced)) {
> 
> Would this cause more memory usage in system?
> 
> For example, one application would fork itself many times. It executable area
> is read only, so all of them share one copy in memory.
> 
> Now we may collapse the range and create one copy for each process.
> 
> Ok, we have max_ptes_shared, while if some ptes are none, could it still do
> collapse?

The max_ptes_shared check should handle that, so I don't immediately see 
a problem with that.

When I thought about the "why is this writable check there" in the past, 
I thought that maybe it was "smarter" to use THP where people are 
actually using that memory for writing (writing heap etc).

But I can understand that some pure r/o users exists that can benefit as 
well.

-- 
Cheers

David / dhildenb