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Transparent Hugepage support #3

From:  Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
To:  linux-mm@kvack.org
Subject:  [PATCH 00 of 30] Transparent Hugepage support #3
Date:  Thu, 21 Jan 2010 07:20:24 +0100
Cc:  Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>, Adam Litke <agl@us.ibm.com>, Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>, Izik Eidus <ieidus@redhat.com>, Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>, Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>, Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>, Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>, Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>, Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com>, KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>, Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>, Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>, Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Archive-link:  Article, Thread

Hello,

this is the latest version of my patchset, it has all cleanups requested by
previous review on linux-mm and more fixes and it ships the first working
khugepaged daemon.

This seems feature complete as far as KVM is concerned, "madvise" mode for
both /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled and
/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/enabled is enough for
hypervisor utilization. The default of the patchset is "always" for both, to
be sure the new code gets exercised even by all apps that could benefit from
this (yes, khugepaged is transparently enabled on all mappings with
what I think is a negligeable/unmesurable overhead and perhaps it becomes
beneficial for long-living vmas with intensive computations on them).

TODO (first things that come to mind):

- at leats smaps should stop calling split_huge_page

- find a way to fix the lru statistics so they will show the right ram amount
  (statistic code these days seems almost more complex than the real useful
  code, especially the isolated lru counter seems very dubious in its
  usefulness and it's further pain to deal with all over the VM). Fixing these
  counters is after all low priority because I know no app aware about the VM
  internals and depending on the exact size of
  inactive/active/anon/file/unevictable lru lists. fixign smaps not to split
  hugepages is much higher priority. The stats don't overflow or underflow,
  they're just not right.

- maybe add some other stat in addition to AnonHugePages in /proc/meminfo. You
  can monitor the effect of khugepaged or of an mprotect calling
  split_huge_page trivially with "grep Anon /proc/meminfo"

- I need to integrate Mel's memory compation code to be used by khugepaged and
  by the page faults if "defrag" sysfs file setting requires it. His results
  (especially with the bug fixes that decreased reclaim a lot) looks promising.

- likely we'll need a slab front allocator too allocating in 2m chunks, but
  this should be re-evaluated after merging Mel's work, maybe he already did
  that.

- khugepaged isn't yet capable of merging readonly shared anon pages, that
  isn't needed by KVM (KVM uses MADV_DONTFORK) but it might want to learn it
  for other apps

- khugepaged should also learn to skip the copy and collapse the hugepage
  in-place, if possible (to undo the effect of surpious split_huge_page)

I'm leaving this under a continous stress with scan_sleep_millisecs and
defrag_sleep_millisecs set to 0 and a 5G swap storm + ~4G in ram. The swap storm
before settling in pause() will call madvise to split all hugepages in ram and
then it will run a further memset again to swapin everything a second time.
Eventually it will settle and khugepaged will remerge as many hugepages as
they're fully mapped in userland (mapped as swapcache is ok, but khugepaged
will not trigger swapin I/O or swapcache minor fault) if there are enough not
fragmented hugepages available.

This is shortly after start.

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
0  5 3938052  67688    208   3684 1219 2779  1239  2779  396 1061  1  5 75 20
2  5 3937092  61612    208   3712 25120 24112 25120 24112 7420 5396  0  8 44 48
0  5 3932116  55536    208   3780 26444 21468 26444 21468 7532 5399  0  8 52 40
0  5 3927264  46724    208   3296 28208 22528 28328 22528 7871 5722  0  7 52 41
AnonPages:       1751352 kB
AnonHugePages:   2021376 kB
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
0  5 3935604  58092    208   3864 1233 2787  1253  2787  400 1061  1  5 74 20
0  5 3933924  54248    208   3508 23748 23548 23904 23548 7112 4829  0  6 49 45
1  4 3937708  60696    208   3704 24680 28680 24760 28680 7034 5112  0  8 50 42
1  4 3934508  59084    208   3304 24096 21020 24156 21020 6832 5015  0  7 48 46
AnonPages:       1746296 kB
AnonHugePages:   2023424 kB

this is after it settled and it's waiting in pause(). khugepaged when it's not
copying with defrag_sleep/scan_sleep both = 0, just trigers a
superoverschedule, but as you can see it's extremely low overhead, only taking
8% of 4 cores or 32% of 1 core. Likely most of the cpu is taking by schedule().
So you can imagine how low overhead it is when sleep is set to a "production"
level and not stress test level. Default sleep is 10seconds and not 2usec...

1  0 5680228 106028    396   5060    0    0     0     0  534 341005  0  8 92  0
1  0 5680228 106028    396   5060    0    0     0     0  517 349159  0  9 91  0
1  0 5680228 106028    396   5060    0    0     0     0  518 346356  0  6 94  0
0  0 5680228 106028    396   5060    0    0     0     0  511 348478  0  8 92  0
AnonPages:        392396 kB
AnonHugePages:   3371008 kB

So it looks good so far.

I think it's probably time to port the patchset to mmotd.
Further review welcome!

Andrea

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