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Date:   Fri, 7 Jul 2023 21:15:02 +0200
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To:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc:     Yin Fengwei <fengwei.yin@intel.com>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
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From:   David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Organization: Red Hat
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] support large folio for mlock
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On 07.07.23 21:06, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 07, 2023 at 08:54:33PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> On 07.07.23 19:26, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>>> On Sat, Jul 08, 2023 at 12:52:18AM +0800, Yin Fengwei wrote:
>>>> This series identified the large folio for mlock to two types:
>>>>     - The large folio is in VM_LOCKED VMA range
>>>>     - The large folio cross VM_LOCKED VMA boundary
>>>
>>> This is somewhere that I think our fixation on MUST USE PMD ENTRIES
>>> has led us astray.  Today when the arguments to mlock() cross a folio
>>> boundary, we split the PMD entry but leave the folio intact.  That means
>>> that we continue to manage the folio as a single entry on the LRU list.
>>> But userspace may have no idea that we're doing this.  It may have made
>>> several calls to mmap() 256kB at once, they've all been coalesced into
>>> a single VMA and khugepaged has come along behind its back and created
>>> a 2MB THP.  Now userspace calls mlock() and instead of treating that as
>>> a hint that oops, maybe we shouldn't've done that, we do our utmost to
>>> preserve the 2MB folio.
>>>
>>> I think this whole approach needs rethinking.  IMO, anonymous folios
>>> should not cross VMA boundaries.  Tell me why I'm wrong.
>>
>> I think we touched upon that a couple of times already, and the main issue
>> is that while it sounds nice in theory, it's impossible in practice.
>>
>> THP are supposed to be transparent, that is, we should not let arbitrary
>> operations fail.
>>
>> But nothing stops user space from
>>
>> (a) mmap'ing a 2 MiB region
>> (b) GUP-pinning the whole range
>> (c) GUP-pinning the first half
>> (d) unpinning the whole range from (a)
>> (e) munmap'ing the second half
>>
>>
>> And that's just one out of many examples I can think of, not even
>> considering temporary/speculative references that can prevent a split at
>> random points in time -- especially when splitting a VMA.
>>
>> Sure, any time we PTE-map a THP we might just say "let's put that on the
>> deferred split queue" and cross fingers that we can eventually split it
>> later. (I was recently thinking about that in the context of the mapcount
>> ...)
>>
>> It's all a big mess ...
> 
> Oh, I agree, there are always going to be circumstances where we realise
> we've made a bad decision and can't (easily) undo it.  Unless we have a
> per-page pincount, and I Would Rather Not Do That. 

I agree ...

But we should _try_
> to do that because it's the right model -- that's what I meant by "Tell

Try to have per-page pincounts? :/ or do you mean, try to split on VMA 
split? I hope the latter (although I'm not sure about performance) :)

> me why I'm wrong"; what scenarios do we have where a user temporarilly
> mlocks (or mprotects or ...) a range of memory, but wants that memory
> to be aged in the LRU exactly the same way as the adjacent memory that
> wasn't mprotected?

Let me throw in a "fun one".

Parent process has a 2 MiB range populated by a THP. fork() a child 
process. Child process mprotects half the VMA.

Should we split the (COW-shared) THP? Or should we COW/unshare in the 
child process (ugh!) during the VMA split.

It all makes my brain hurt.

> 
> GUP-pinning is different, and I don't think GUP-pinning should split
> a folio.  That's a temporary use (not FOLL_LONGTERM), eg, we're doing
> tcp zero-copy or it's the source/target of O_DIRECT.  That's not an
> instruction that this memory is different from its neighbours.
> 
> Maybe we end up deciding to split folios on GUP-pin.  That would be
> regrettable.

That would probably never be accepted, because the ones that heavily 
rely on THP (databases, VMs), typically also end up using a lot of 
features that use (long-term) page pinning. Don't get me started on 
io_uring with fixed buffers.

-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb