Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S965736AbbKDVn5 (ORCPT ); Wed, 4 Nov 2015 16:43:57 -0500 Received: from mail-ob0-f181.google.com ([209.85.214.181]:36028 "EHLO mail-ob0-f181.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S965372AbbKDVnz (ORCPT ); Wed, 4 Nov 2015 16:43:55 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20151104200006.GA46783@kernel.org> References: <1446600367-7976-1-git-send-email-minchan@kernel.org> <1446600367-7976-2-git-send-email-minchan@kernel.org> <20151104200006.GA46783@kernel.org> From: Andy Lutomirski Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2015 13:43:35 -0800 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 01/13] mm: support madvise(MADV_FREE) To: Shaohua Li Cc: Minchan Kim , Andrew Morton , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , "linux-mm@kvack.org" , Michael Kerrisk , Linux API , Hugh Dickins , Johannes Weiner , Rik van Riel , Mel Gorman , KOSAKI Motohiro , Jason Evans , Daniel Micay , "Kirill A. Shutemov" , Michal Hocko , yalin wang , Ben Maurer Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1788 Lines: 37 On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 12:00 PM, Shaohua Li wrote: > > The new proposal tries to fix the TLB issue. We introduce two madvise verbs: > > MARK_FREE. Userspace notifies kernel the memory range can be discarded. Kernel > just records the range in current stage. Should memory pressure happen, page > reclaim can free the memory directly regardless the pte state. > > MARK_NOFREE. Userspace notifies kernel the memory range will be reused soon. > Kernel deletes the record and prevents page reclaim discards the memory. If the > memory isn't reclaimed, userspace will access the old memory, otherwise do > normal page fault handling. > > The point is to let userspace notify kernel if memory can be discarded, instead > of depending on pte dirty bit used by MADV_FREE. With these, no TLB flush is > required till page reclaim actually frees the memory (page reclaim need do the > TLB flush for MADV_FREE too). It still preserves the lazy memory free merit of > MADV_FREE. > > Compared to MADV_FREE, reusing memory with the new proposal isn't transparent, > eg must call MARK_NOFREE. But it's easy to utilize the new API in jemalloc. > I can't speak to the usefulness of this or to other arches, but on x86 (unless you have nohz_full or similar enabled), a pair of syscalls should be *much* faster than an IPI or a page fault. I don't know how expensive it is to write to a clean page or to access an unaccessed page on x86. I'm sure it's not free (there's memory bandwidth if nothing else), but it could be very cheap. --Andy -- 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/