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From:   Uladzislau Rezki <urezki@gmail.com>
Date:   Thu, 25 Mar 2021 15:06:57 +0100
To:     Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Uladzislau Rezki <urezki@gmail.com>,
        Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>,
        Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
        Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@gmail.com>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>,
        Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux-Net <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        Linux-NFS <linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/9 v6] Introduce a bulk order-0 page allocator with two
 in-tree users
Message-ID: <20210325140657.GA1908@pc638.lan>
References: <20210325114228.27719-1-mgorman@techsingularity.net>
 <20210325125001.GW1719932@casper.infradead.org>
 <20210325132556.GS3697@techsingularity.net>
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User-Agent: Mutt/1.10.1 (2018-07-13)
Precedence: bulk

> On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 12:50:01PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 11:42:19AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > > This series introduces a bulk order-0 page allocator with sunrpc and
> > > the network page pool being the first users. The implementation is not
> > > efficient as semantics needed to be ironed out first. If no other semantic
> > > changes are needed, it can be made more efficient.  Despite that, this
> > > is a performance-related for users that require multiple pages for an
> > > operation without multiple round-trips to the page allocator. Quoting
> > > the last patch for the high-speed networking use-case
> > > 
> > >             Kernel          XDP stats       CPU     pps           Delta
> > >             Baseline        XDP-RX CPU      total   3,771,046       n/a
> > >             List            XDP-RX CPU      total   3,940,242    +4.49%
> > >             Array           XDP-RX CPU      total   4,249,224   +12.68%
> > > 
> > > >From the SUNRPC traces of svc_alloc_arg()
> > > 
> > > 	Single page: 25.007 us per call over 532,571 calls
> > > 	Bulk list:    6.258 us per call over 517,034 calls
> > > 	Bulk array:   4.590 us per call over 517,442 calls
> > > 
> > > Both potential users in this series are corner cases (NFS and high-speed
> > > networks) so it is unlikely that most users will see any benefit in the
> > > short term. Other potential other users are batch allocations for page
> > > cache readahead, fault around and SLUB allocations when high-order pages
> > > are unavailable. It's unknown how much benefit would be seen by converting
> > > multiple page allocation calls to a single batch or what difference it may
> > > make to headline performance.
> > 
> > We have a third user, vmalloc(), with a 16% perf improvement.  I know the
> > email says 21% but that includes the 5% improvement from switching to
> > kvmalloc() to allocate area->pages.
> > 
> > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210323133948.GA10046@pc638.lan/
> > 
> 
> That's fairly promising. Assuming the bulk allocator gets merged, it would
> make sense to add vmalloc on top. That's for bringing it to my attention
> because it's far more relevant than my imaginary potential use cases.
> 
For the vmalloc we should be able to allocating on a specific NUMA node,
at least the current interface takes it into account. As far as i see
the current interface allocate on a current node:

static inline unsigned long
alloc_pages_bulk_array(gfp_t gfp, unsigned long nr_pages, struct page **page_array)
{
    return __alloc_pages_bulk(gfp, numa_mem_id(), NULL, nr_pages, NULL, page_array);
}

Or am i missing something?

--
Vlad Rezki