linux-kernel - [PATCH] arm64, mm: avoid always making PTE dirty in pte

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Message-Id: <20251015023712.46598-1-ying.huang@linux.alibaba.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2025 10:37:12 +0800
From: Huang Ying <ying.huang@...ux.alibaba.com>
To: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>,
	Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>
Cc: Huang Ying <ying.huang@...ux.alibaba.com>,
	Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@....com>,
	Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@....com>,
	Gavin Shan <gshan@...hat.com>,
	Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@...nel.org>,
	"Matthew Wilcox (Oracle)" <willy@...radead.org>,
	Yicong Yang <yangyicong@...ilicon.com>,
	linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: [PATCH] arm64, mm: avoid always making PTE dirty in pte_mkwrite()

Current pte_mkwrite_novma() makes PTE dirty unconditionally.  This may
mark some pages that are never written dirty wrongly.  For example,
do_swap_page() may map the exclusive pages with writable and clean PTEs
if the VMA is writable and the page fault is for read access.
However, current pte_mkwrite_novma() implementation always dirties the
PTE.  This may cause unnecessary disk writing if the pages are
never written before being reclaimed.

So, change pte_mkwrite_novma() to clear the PTE_RDONLY bit only if the
PTE_DIRTY bit is set to make it possible to make the PTE writable and
clean.

The current behavior was introduced in commit 73e86cb03cf2 ("arm64:
Move PTE_RDONLY bit handling out of set_pte_at()").  Before that,
pte_mkwrite() only sets the PTE_WRITE bit, while set_pte_at() only
clears the PTE_RDONLY bit if both the PTE_WRITE and the PTE_DIRTY bits
are set.

To test the performance impact of the patch, on an arm64 server
machine, run 16 redis-server processes on socket 1 and 16
memtier_benchmark processes on socket 0 with mostly get
transactions (that is, redis-server will mostly read memory only).
The memory footprint of redis-server is larger than the available
memory, so swap out/in will be triggered.  Test results show that the
patch can avoid most swapping out because the pages are mostly clean.
And the benchmark throughput improves ~23.9% in the test.

Fixes: 73e86cb03cf2 ("arm64: Move PTE_RDONLY bit handling out of set_pte_at()")
Signed-off-by: Huang Ying <ying.huang@...ux.alibaba.com>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>
Cc: Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>
Cc: Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@....com>
Cc: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@....com>
Cc: Gavin Shan <gshan@...hat.com>
Cc: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@...nel.org>
Cc: "Matthew Wilcox (Oracle)" <willy@...radead.org>
Cc: Yicong Yang <yangyicong@...ilicon.com>
Cc: linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org
Cc: linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
---
 arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h | 3 ++-
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
index aa89c2e67ebc..0944e296dd4a 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
+++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
@@ -293,7 +293,8 @@ static inline pmd_t set_pmd_bit(pmd_t pmd, pgprot_t prot)
 static inline pte_t pte_mkwrite_novma(pte_t pte)
 {
 	pte = set_pte_bit(pte, __pgprot(PTE_WRITE));
-	pte = clear_pte_bit(pte, __pgprot(PTE_RDONLY));
+	if (pte_sw_dirty(pte))
+		pte = clear_pte_bit(pte, __pgprot(PTE_RDONLY));
 	return pte;
 }

-- 
2.39.5