mm/huge_memory.c · 1e1836e84f87d12feac6dd225fcef5eba1ca724b · xcap / xcap-capability-linux

mm: revert "thp: make MADV_HUGEPAGE check for mm->def_flags" · 1e1836e8

Alex Thorlton authored Apr 07, 2014

The main motivation behind this patch is to provide a way to disable THP
for jobs where the code cannot be modified, and using a malloc hook with
madvise is not an option (i.e. statically allocated data). This patch
allows us to do just that, without affecting other jobs running on the
system.

We need to do this sort of thing for jobs where THP hurts performance,
due to the possibility of increased remote memory accesses that can be
created by situations such as the following:

When you touch 1 byte of an untouched, contiguous 2MB chunk, a THP will
be handed out, and the THP will be stuck on whatever node the chunk was
originally referenced from. If many remote nodes need to do work on
that same chunk, they'll be making remote accesses.

With THP disabled, 4K pages can be handed out to separate nodes as
they're needed, greatly reducing the amount of remote accesses to
memory.

This patch is based on some of my work combined with some
suggestions/patches given by Oleg Nesterov. The main goal here is to
add a prctl switch to allow us to disable to THP on a per mm_struct
basis.

Here's a bit of test data with the new patch in place...

First with the flag unset:

# perf stat -a ./prctl_wrapper_mmv3 0 ./thp_pthread -C 0 -m 0 -c 512 -b 256g
Setting thp_disabled for this task...
thp_disable: 0
Set thp_disabled state to 0
Process pid = 18027

PF/
MAX MIN TOTCPU/ TOT_PF/ TOT_PF/ WSEC/
TYPE: CPUS WALL WALL SYS USER TOTCPU CPU WALL_SEC SYS_SEC CPU NODES
512 1.120 0.060 0.000 0.110 0.110 0.000 28571428864 -9223372036854775808 55803572 23

Performance counter stats for './prctl_wrapper_mmv3_hack 0 ./thp_pthread -C 0 -m 0 -c 512 -b 256g':

273719072.841402 task-clock # 641.026 CPUs utilized [100.00%]
1,008,986 context-switches # 0.000 M/sec [100.00%]
7,717 CPU-migrations # 0.000 M/sec [100.00%]
1,698,932 page-faults # 0.000 M/sec
355,222,544,890,379 cycles # 1.298 GHz [100.00%]
536,445,412,234,588 stalled-cycles-frontend # 151.02% frontend cycles idle [100.00%]
409,110,531,310,223 stalled-cycles-backend # 115.17% backend cycles idle [100.00%]
148,286,797,266,411 instructions # 0.42 insns per cycle
# 3.62 stalled cycles per insn [100.00%]
27,061,793,159,503 branches # 98.867 M/sec [100.00%]
1,188,655,196 branch-misses # 0.00% of all branches

427.001706337 seconds time elapsed

Now with the flag set:

# perf stat -a ./prctl_wrapper_mmv3 1 ./thp_pthread -C 0 -m 0 -c 512 -b 256g
Setting thp_disabled for this task...
thp_disable: 1
Set thp_disabled state to 1
Process pid = 144957

PF/
MAX MIN TOTCPU/ TOT_PF/ TOT_PF/ WSEC/
TYPE: CPUS WALL WALL SYS USER TOTCPU CPU WALL_SEC SYS_SEC CPU NODES
512 0.620 0.260 0.250 0.320 0.570 0.001 51612901376 128000000000 100806448 23

Performance counter stats for './prctl_wrapper_mmv3_hack 1 ./thp_pthread -C 0 -m 0 -c 512 -b 256g':

138789390.540183 task-clock # 641.959 CPUs utilized [100.00%]
534,205 context-switches # 0.000 M/sec [100.00%]
4,595 CPU-migrations # 0.000 M/sec [100.00%]
63,133,119 page-faults # 0.000 M/sec
147,977,747,269,768 cycles # 1.066 GHz [100.00%]
200,524,196,493,108 stalled-cycles-frontend # 135.51% frontend cycles idle [100.00%]
105,175,163,716,388 stalled-cycles-backend # 71.07% backend cycles idle [100.00%]
180,916,213,503,160 instructions # 1.22 insns per cycle
# 1.11 stalled cycles per insn [100.00%]
26,999,511,005,868 branches # 194.536 M/sec [100.00%]
714,066,351 branch-misses # 0.00% of all branches

216.196778807 seconds time elapsed

As with previous versions of the patch, We're getting about a 2x
performance increase here. Here's a link to the test case I used, along
with the little wrapper to activate the flag:

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/memtests/thp_pthread_mmprctlv3.tar.gz

This patch (of 3):

Revert commit 8e72033f and add in code to fix up any issues caused
by the revert.

The revert is necessary because hugepage_madvise would return -EINVAL
when VM_NOHUGEPAGE is set, which will break subsequent chunks of this
patch set.

Here's a snip of an e-mail from Gerald detailing the original purpose of
this code, and providing justification for the revert:

"The intent of commit 8e72033f was to guard against any future
programming errors that may result in an madvice(MADV_HUGEPAGE) on
guest mappings, which would crash the kernel.

Martin suggested adding the bit to arch/s390/mm/pgtable.c, if
8e72033f

was to be reverted, because that check will also prevent
a kernel crash in the case described above, it will now send a
SIGSEGV instead.

This would now also allow to do the madvise on other parts, if
needed, so it is a more flexible approach. One could also say that
it would have been better to do it this way right from the
beginning..."

Signed-off-by: Alex Thorlton <athorlton@sgi.com>
Suggested-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1e1836e8