Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 10:47:36 +1000
From: "'David Gibson'" <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
To: Ray Bryant <raybry@sgi.com>
Cc: "Chen, Kenneth W" <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org, lse-tech@lists.sourceforge.net,
       "'Andy Whitcroft'" <apw@shadowen.org>,
       "'Andrew Morton'" <akpm@osdl.org>
Subject: Re: [Lse-tech] Re: hugetlb demand paging patch part [2/3]
Message-ID: <20040419004736.GA4697@zax>
Mail-Followup-To: 'David Gibson' <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>,
	Ray Bryant <raybry@sgi.com>,
	"Chen, Kenneth W" <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com>,
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	'Andrew Morton' <akpm@osdl.org>
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On Sun, Apr 18, 2004 at 12:36:05PM -0500, Ray Bryant wrote:
> 
> 
> 'David Gibson' wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> >My main interest in it is as a prerequisite for various methods of
> >"automatically" using hugepages for programs where it is difficult to
> >manually code them to use hugetlbfs.  In particular, think HPC
> >monsters written in FORTRAN.  e.g. automatically putting suitable
> >aligned anonymous mmap()s in hugepages under some circumstances (I
> >can't say I like that idea much), using an LD_PRELOAD to put
> >malloc()ated memory into hugepages, or using a hacked ELF loader to
> >put the BSS section (again, think FORTRAN) into hugepages (actually
> >easier and less ugly than it sounds).
> >
> 
> Well, that certainly is a laudable goal.  At the moment, one usually has to 
> resort to such things as POINTER variables and the like to get access to 
> hugetlbpage segments.  Unfortunately, some of our experiments with the 
> Intel compiler for ia64 have indicated  that the generated code can be 
> significantly slower when arrays are referenced off of POINTER variables 
> than when the same arrays are referenced out of COMMON, thus eliminating 
> the performance gain of HUGETLB pages.

Well, that's one problem with using POINTERs, but I think perhaps the
more serious one is that a lot of HPC code is written by scientists
who aren't programmers, and who still think in FORTRAN77.

> My question was really intended to address applying development effort to 
> things that the users of hugetlbpages will likely actually use.  For 
> example, it seems pointless to worry too much about demand paging of 
> hugetlbpages out to disk.  Anyone who uses hugetlbpages for the performance 
> boost they give will also likely have rightsized their problem or machine 
> configuration to eliminate any swapping.

Well, indeed.  Note that this "demand paging" set of patches don't
actually do paging out to disk - they just do on-demand allocation of
physical hugepages, rather than prefaulting them all.  My only real
interest in it is that part of the mechanism is identical to that
needed for COW (handle_hugetlb_mm_fault(), in particular).

> >In any of these cases having the memory have different semantics
> >(MAP_SHARED) to normal anonymous memory would clearly be a Bad Thing.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson
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