linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2 0/8] Introduce a huge-page pre-zeroing mechanism

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Message-ID: <7963534f-cce8-4330-8a67-3f31bd6b2166@kernel.org>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:15:29 +0100
From: "David Hildenbrand (Red Hat)" <david@...nel.org>
To: Li Zhe <lizhe.67@...edance.com>
Cc: akpm@...ux-foundation.org, ankur.a.arora@...cle.com, fvdl@...gle.com,
 joao.m.martins@...cle.com, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
 mhocko@...e.com, mjguzik@...il.com, muchun.song@...ux.dev,
 osalvador@...e.de, raghavendra.kt@....com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/8] Introduce a huge-page pre-zeroing mechanism

On 1/13/26 07:37, Li Zhe wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:52:12 +0100, david@...nel.org wrote:
> 
>>> As for concern (4), I believe it is orthogonal to this patchset, and
>>> the cover letter already contains a performance comparison that
>>> demonstrates the additional benefit.
>>>
>>>> I did see some comments in [1] about QEMU supporting user-mode
>>>> parallel zero-page operations; I'm just not sure what the current
>>>> state of that support looks like, or what the corresponding benchmark
>>>> numbers are.
>>>
>>> As noted above, QEMU already employs a parallel page-touch mechanism,
>>> yet the elapsed time remains noticeable. I am not deeply familiar with
>>> QEMU; please correct me if I am mistaken.
>>
>> I implemented some part of the parallel preallocation support in QEMU.
>>
>> With QEMU, you can specify the number of threads and even specify the
>> NUMA-placement of these threads. So you can pretty much fine-tune that
>> for an environment.
>>
>> You still pre-zero all hugetlb pages at VM startup time, just in
>> parallel though. So you pay some price at APP startup time.
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> Thank you for the comprehensive explanation.
> 
> You are absolutely correct: QEMU's parallel preallocation is performed
> only during VM start-up. We submitted this patch series mainly
> because we observed that, even with the existing parallel mechanism,
> launching large-size VMs still incurs prohibitive delays. (Bringing up
> a 2 TB VM still requires more than 40 seconds for zeroing)
> 
>> If you know that you will run such a VM (or something else) later, you
>> could pre-zero the memory from user space by using a hugetlb-backed file
>> and supplying that to QEMU as memory backend for the VM. Then, you can
>> start your VM without any pre-zeroing.
>>
>> I guess that approach should work universally. Of course, there are
>> limitations, as you would have to know how much memory an app needs, and
>> have a way to supply that memory in form of a file to that app.
> 
> Regarding user-space pre-zeroing, I agree that it is feasible once the
> VM's memory footprint is known. We evaluated this approach internally;
> however, in production environments, it is almost impossible to predict
> the exact amount of memory a VM will require.

Of course, you could preallocate to the expected maximum and then 
truncate the file to the size you need :)

-- 
Cheers

David