Huge page helps to reduce TLB miss rate, but it has higher cache
footprint, sometimes this may cause some issue. For example, when
clearing huge page on x86_64 platform, the cache footprint is 2M. But
on a Xeon E5 v3 2699 CPU, there are 18 cores, 36 threads, and only 45M
LLC (last level cache). That is, in average, there are 2.5M LLC for
each core and 1.25M LLC for each thread.
If the cache pressure is heavy when clearing the huge page, and we clear
the huge page from the begin to the end, it is possible that the begin
of huge page is evicted from the cache after we finishing clearing the
end of the huge page. And it is possible for the application to access
the begin of the huge page after clearing the huge page.
To help the above situation, in this patch, when we clear a huge page,
the order to clear sub-pages is changed. In quite some situation, we
can get the address that the application will access after we clear the
huge page, for example, in a page fault handler. Instead of clearing
the huge page from begin to end, we will clear the sub-pages farthest
from the the sub-page to access firstly, and clear the sub-page to
access last. This will make the sub-page to access most cache-hot and
sub-pages around it more cache-hot too. If we cannot know the address
the application will access, the begin of the huge page is assumed to be
the the address the application will access.
With this patch, the throughput increases ~28.3% in vm-scalability
anon-w-seq test case with 72 processes on a 2 socket Xeon E5 v3 2699
system (36 cores, 72 threads). The test case creates 72 processes, each
process mmap a big anonymous memory area and writes to it from the begin
to the end. For each process, other processes could be seen as other
workload which generates heavy cache pressure. At the same time, the
cache miss rate reduced from ~33.4% to ~31.7%, the IPC (instruction per
cycle) increased from 0.56 to 0.74, and the time spent in user space is
reduced ~7.9%
Christopher Lameter suggests to clear bytes inside a sub-page from end
to begin too. But tests show no visible performance difference in the
tests. May because the size of page is small compared with the cache
size.
Thanks Andi Kleen to propose to use address to access to determine the
order of sub-pages to clear.
The hugetlbfs access address could be improved, will do that in another
patch.
[ying.huang@intel.com: improve readability of clear_huge_page()]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170830051842.1397-1-ying.huang@intel.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170815014618.15842-1-ying.huang@intel.com
Suggested-by: Andi Kleen <andi.kleen@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Nadia Yvette Chambers <nyc@holomorphy.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <mawilcox@microsoft.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
Cc: Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
c79b57e462