From:   Uladzislau Rezki <urezki@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue, 21 Mar 2023 06:23:39 +0100
To:     Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc:     Lorenzo Stoakes <lstoakes@gmail.com>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>,
        Uladzislau Rezki <urezki@gmail.com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>,
        Liu Shixin <liushixin2@huawei.com>,
        Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 2/4] mm: vmalloc: use rwsem, mutex for vmap_area_lock
 and vmap_block->lock
Message-ID: <ZBk/Wxj4rXPra/ge@pc636>
References: <cover.1679209395.git.lstoakes@gmail.com>
 <6c7f1ac0aeb55faaa46a09108d3999e4595870d9.1679209395.git.lstoakes@gmail.com>
 <ZBkDuLKLhsOHNUeG@destitution>
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On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 12:09:12PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 19, 2023 at 07:09:31AM +0000, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
> > vmalloc() is, by design, not permitted to be used in atomic context and
> > already contains components which may sleep, so avoiding spin locks is not
> > a problem from the perspective of atomic context.
> > 
> > The global vmap_area_lock is held when the red/black tree rooted in
> > vmap_are_root is accessed and thus is rather long-held and under
> > potentially high contention. It is likely to be under contention for reads
> > rather than write, so replace it with a rwsem.
> > 
> > Each individual vmap_block->lock is likely to be held for less time but
> > under low contention, so a mutex is not an outrageous choice here.
> > 
> > A subset of test_vmalloc.sh performance results:-
> > 
> > fix_size_alloc_test             0.40%
> > full_fit_alloc_test		2.08%
> > long_busy_list_alloc_test	0.34%
> > random_size_alloc_test		-0.25%
> > random_size_align_alloc_test	0.06%
> > ...
> > all tests cycles                0.2%
> > 
> > This represents a tiny reduction in performance that sits barely above
> > noise.
> 
> I'm travelling right now, but give me a few days and I'll test this
> against the XFS workloads that hammer the global vmalloc spin lock
> really, really badly. XFS can use vm_map_ram and vmalloc really
> heavily for metadata buffers and hit the global spin lock from every
> CPU in the system at the same time (i.e. highly concurrent
> workloads). vmalloc is also heavily used in the hottest path
> throught the journal where we process and calculate delta changes to
> several million items every second, again spread across every CPU in
> the system at the same time.
> 
> We really need the global spinlock to go away completely, but in the
> mean time a shared read lock should help a little bit....
> 
I am working on it. I submitted a proposal how to eliminate it:


<snip>
Hello, LSF.

Title: Introduce a per-cpu-vmap-cache to eliminate a vmap lock contention

Description:
 Currently the vmap code is not scaled to number of CPU cores in a system
 because a global vmap space is protected by a single spinlock. Such approach
 has a clear bottleneck if many CPUs simultaneously access to one resource.

 In this talk i would like to describe a drawback, show some data related
 to contentions and places where those occur in a code. Apart of that i
 would like to share ideas how to eliminate it providing a few approaches
 and compare them.

Requirements:
 * It should be a per-cpu approach;
 * Search of freed ptrs should not interfere with other freeing(as much as we can);
 *   - offload allocated areas(buzy ones) per-cpu;
 * Cache ready sized objects or merge them into one big per-cpu-space(split on demand);
 * Lazily-freed areas either drained per-cpu individually or by one CPU for all;
 * Prefetch a fixed size in front and allocate per-cpu

Goals:
 * Implement a per-cpu way of allocation to eliminate a contention.

Thanks!
<snip>

--
Uladzislau Rezki