Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752110AbbKAGaZ (ORCPT ); Sun, 1 Nov 2015 01:30:25 -0500 Received: from mail-ig0-f175.google.com ([209.85.213.175]:38907 "EHLO mail-ig0-f175.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750830AbbKAGaW (ORCPT ); Sun, 1 Nov 2015 01:30:22 -0500 Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/8] MADV_FREE support To: David Rientjes , Minchan Kim References: <1446188504-28023-1-git-send-email-minchan@kernel.org> Cc: Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, Michael Kerrisk , linux-api@vger.kernel.org, Hugh Dickins , Johannes Weiner , zhangyanfei@cn.fujitsu.com, Rik van Riel , Mel Gorman , KOSAKI Motohiro , Jason Evans , "Kirill A. Shutemov" , Michal Hocko , yalin.wang2010@gmail.com, Shaohua Li From: Daniel Micay X-Enigmail-Draft-Status: N1110 Message-ID: <5635B159.8030307@gmail.com> Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2015 01:29:45 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.3.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha256; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="EuRHwMLBw5CVJE0huIu9LbpjktbvTsiIP" Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 6494 Lines: 147 This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 4880 and 3156) --EuRHwMLBw5CVJE0huIu9LbpjktbvTsiIP Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On 01/11/15 12:51 AM, David Rientjes wrote: > On Fri, 30 Oct 2015, Minchan Kim wrote: >=20 >> MADV_FREE is on linux-next so long time. The reason was two, I think. >> >> 1. MADV_FREE code on reclaim path was really mess. >> >> 2. Andrew really want to see voice of userland people who want to use >> the syscall. >> >> A few month ago, Daniel Micay(jemalloc active contributor) requested m= e >> to make progress upstreaming but I was busy at that time so it took >> so long time for me to revist the code and finally, I clean it up the >> mess recently so it solves the #2 issue. >> >> As well, Daniel and Jason(jemalloc maintainer) requested it to Andrew >> again recently and they said it would be great to have even though >> it has swap dependency now so Andrew decided he will do that for v4.4.= >> >=20 > First, thanks very much for refreshing the patchset and reposting after= a=20 > series of changes have been periodically added to -mm, it makes it much= =20 > easier. >=20 > For tcmalloc, we can do some things in the allocator itself to increase= =20 > the amount of memory backed by thp. Specifically, we can prefer to=20 > release Spans to pageblocks that are already not backed by thp so there= is=20 > no additional split on each scavenge. This is somewhat easy if all mem= ory=20 > is organized into hugepage-aligned pageblocks in the allocator itself. = =20 > Second, we can prefer to release Spans of longer length on each scaveng= e=20 > so we can delay scavenging for as long as possible in a hope we can fin= d=20 > more pages to coalesce. Third, we can discount refaulted released memo= ry=20 > from the scavenging period. >=20 > That significantly improves the amount of memory backed by thp for=20 > tcmalloc. The problem, however, is that tcmalloc uses MADV_DONTNEED to= =20 > release memory to the system and MADV_FREE wouldn't help at all in a=20 > swapless environment. >=20 > To combat that, I've proposed a new MADV bit that simply caches the=20 > ranges freed by the allocator per vma and places them on both a per-vma= =20 > and per-memcg list. During reclaim, this list is iterated and ptes are= =20 > freed after thp split period to the normal directed reclaim. Without=20 > memory pressure, this backs 100% of the heap with thp with a relatively= =20 > lightweight kernel change (the majority is vma manipulation on split) a= nd=20 > a couple line change to tcmalloc. When pulling memory from the returne= d=20 > freelists, the memory that we have MADV_DONTNEED'd, we need to use anot= her=20 > MADV bit to remove it from this cache, so there is a second madvise(2) = > syscall involved but the freeing call is much less expensive since ther= e=20 > is no pagetable walk without memory pressure or synchronous thp split. >=20 > I've been looking at MADV_FREE to see if there is common ground that co= uld=20 > be shared, but perhaps it's just easier to ask what your proposed strat= egy=20 > is so that tcmalloc users, especially those in swapless environments,=20 > would benefit from any of your work? The current implementation requires swap because the kernel already has robust infrastructure for swapping out anonymous memory when there's memory pressure. The MADV_FREE implementation just has to hook in there and cause pages to be dropped instead of swapped out. There's no reason it couldn't be extended to work in swapless environments, but it will take additional design and implementation work. As a stop-gap, I think zram and friends will work fine as a form of swap for this. It can definitely be improved to cooperate well with THP too. I've been following the progress, and most of the problems seem to have been with the THP and that's a very active area of development. Seems best to deal with that after a simple, working implementation lands. The best aspect of MADV_FREE is that it completely avoids page faults when there's no memory pressure. Making use of the freed memory only triggers page faults if the pages had to be dropped because the system ran out of memory. It also avoids needing to zero the pages. The memory can also still be freed at any time if there's memory pressure again even if it's handed out as an allocation until it's actually touched. The call to madvise still has significant overhead, but it's much cheaper than MADV_DONTNEED. Allocators will be able to lean on the kernel to make good decisions rather than implementing lazy freeing entirely on their own. It should improve performance *and* behavior under memory pressure since allocators can be more aggressive with it than MADV_DONTNEED. A nice future improvement would be landing MADV_FREE_UNDO feature to allow an attempt to pin the pages in memory again. It would make this work very well for implementing caches that are dropped under memory pressure. Windows has this via MEM_RESET (essentially MADV_FREE) and MEM_RESET_UNDO. Android has it for ashmem too (pinning/unpinning). I think browser vendors would be very interested in it. --EuRHwMLBw5CVJE0huIu9LbpjktbvTsiIP Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: OpenPGP digital signature Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJWNbFdAAoJEPnnEuWa9fIqHEEP/0bBbBm8k0VQdktVYKeRRPZD iZzk92/p0lvhPbaN9tpXQK4TBeZGYIhxblsm3qqoiwaWdtzzePbujouyea9x5gar PGf0wB55zio3lfYgwjNLf/SRgMOsDmJEOhXDoB5a0f0EvpvZdXSbvI9r03z6HaSP Z2YRbybhHl1Xda6xb5CJUqzpG4E9k5oxMvRBoBxFT8+YUujf5weK8Ats8JFLO239 GTU6jAySYpkGfG5kTyG7QRag2/zfOLvwb+3mToFsdlKDHl1tAiqix7PW2fMHq6Ua FVLg3Efl7uzAqdQnsc8XMG5Jax56KOj1dqfdb0FfJyPbwKMDX6uF6DaLl/QJtsag wLvn7uQMgtWc/GCVPi/ZdwwjpHga/1NB+xaZqLEkFi6KOqYoXNvhh4QiPidaAnZ4 InnUiUC/Fz8cvxaHlB1Gz8aTK1IIGfYEdPx+LeOBkeXZVWWx7CQ3FAowTBpM+kIq EzeTLesaig60WV7AjtxsQ/NmTnY4v8Y9lIbQY2COD1p+25XhZckZ+Y9XdQaTEq8/ CRcEc3uiyz64cwL8OhUfLCnHlFEg53uOjypt2BBTsT+UwbRBGeISPnni9Ltt5Zuq ZJSmzeFIEsej6Hy4JkB24bLzvEPdIFxYCn+xGYF0nL5AUPqGuBkMd+8IpuHInn1v PNtOKzoIvZaJ4CODt8oE =0//q -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --EuRHwMLBw5CVJE0huIu9LbpjktbvTsiIP-- -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/