501 Commits

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Andrea Arcangeli	71e3aac072	thp: transparent hugepage core ... Lately I've been working to make KVM use hugepages transparently without the usual restrictions of hugetlbfs. Some of the restrictions I'd like to see removed: 1) hugepages have to be swappable or the guest physical memory remains locked in RAM and can't be paged out to swap 2) if a hugepage allocation fails, regular pages should be allocated instead and mixed in the same vma without any failure and without userland noticing 3) if some task quits and more hugepages become available in the buddy, guest physical memory backed by regular pages should be relocated on hugepages automatically in regions under madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) (ideally event driven by waking up the kernel deamon if the order=HPAGE_PMD_SHIFT-PAGE_SHIFT list becomes not null) 4) avoidance of reservation and maximization of use of hugepages whenever possible. Reservation (needed to avoid runtime fatal faliures) may be ok for 1 machine with 1 database with 1 database cache with 1 database cache size known at boot time. It's definitely not feasible with a virtualization hypervisor usage like RHEV-H that runs an unknown number of virtual machines with an unknown size of each virtual machine with an unknown amount of pagecache that could be potentially useful in the host for guest not using O_DIRECT (aka cache=off). hugepages in the virtualization hypervisor (and also in the guest!) are much more important than in a regular host not using virtualization, becasue with NPT/EPT they decrease the tlb-miss cacheline accesses from 24 to 19 in case only the hypervisor uses transparent hugepages, and they decrease the tlb-miss cacheline accesses from 19 to 15 in case both the linux hypervisor and the linux guest both uses this patch (though the guest will limit the addition speedup to anonymous regions only for now...). Even more important is that the tlb miss handler is much slower on a NPT/EPT guest than for a regular shadow paging or no-virtualization scenario. So maximizing the amount of virtual memory cached by the TLB pays off significantly more with NPT/EPT than without (even if there would be no significant speedup in the tlb-miss runtime). The first (and more tedious) part of this work requires allowing the VM to handle anonymous hugepages mixed with regular pages transparently on regular anonymous vmas. This is what this patch tries to achieve in the least intrusive possible way. We want hugepages and hugetlb to be used in a way so that all applications can benefit without changes (as usual we leverage the KVM virtualization design: by improving the Linux VM at large, KVM gets the performance boost too). The most important design choice is: always fallback to 4k allocation if the hugepage allocation fails! This is the _very_ opposite of some large pagecache patches that failed with -EIO back then if a 64k (or similar) allocation failed... Second important decision (to reduce the impact of the feature on the existing pagetable handling code) is that at any time we can split an hugepage into 512 regular pages and it has to be done with an operation that can't fail. This way the reliability of the swapping isn't decreased (no need to allocate memory when we are short on memory to swap) and it's trivial to plug a split_huge_page* one-liner where needed without polluting the VM. Over time we can teach mprotect, mremap and friends to handle pmd_trans_huge natively without calling split_huge_page*. The fact it can't fail isn't just for swap: if split_huge_page would return -ENOMEM (instead of the current void) we'd need to rollback the mprotect from the middle of it (ideally including undoing the split_vma) which would be a big change and in the very wrong direction (it'd likely be simpler not to call split_huge_page at all and to teach mprotect and friends to handle hugepages instead of rolling them back from the middle). In short the very value of split_huge_page is that it can't fail. The collapsing and madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) part will remain separated and incremental and it'll just be an "harmless" addition later if this initial part is agreed upon. It also should be noted that locking-wise replacing regular pages with hugepages is going to be very easy if compared to what I'm doing below in split_huge_page, as it will only happen when page_count(page) matches page_mapcount(page) if we can take the PG_lock and mmap_sem in write mode. collapse_huge_page will be a "best effort" that (unlike split_huge_page) can fail at the minimal sign of trouble and we can try again later. collapse_huge_page will be similar to how KSM works and the madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) will work similar to madvise(MADV_MERGEABLE). The default I like is that transparent hugepages are used at page fault time. This can be changed with /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled. The control knob can be set to three values "always", "madvise", "never" which mean respectively that hugepages are always used, or only inside madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) regions, or never used. /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag instead controls if the hugepage allocation should defrag memory aggressively "always", only inside "madvise" regions, or "never". The pmd_trans_splitting/pmd_trans_huge locking is very solid. The put_page (from get_user_page users that can't use mmu notifier like O_DIRECT) that runs against a __split_huge_page_refcount instead was a pain to serialize in a way that would result always in a coherent page count for both tail and head. I think my locking solution with a compound_lock taken only after the page_first is valid and is still a PageHead should be safe but it surely needs review from SMP race point of view. In short there is no current existing way to serialize the O_DIRECT final put_page against split_huge_page_refcount so I had to invent a new one (O_DIRECT loses knowledge on the mapping status by the time gup_fast returns so...). And I didn't want to impact all gup/gup_fast users for now, maybe if we change the gup interface substantially we can avoid this locking, I admit I didn't think too much about it because changing the gup unpinning interface would be invasive. If we ignored O_DIRECT we could stick to the existing compound refcounting code, by simply adding a get_user_pages_fast_flags(foll_flags) where KVM (and any other mmu notifier user) would call it without FOLL_GET (and if FOLL_GET isn't set we'd just BUG_ON if nobody registered itself in the current task mmu notifier list yet). But O_DIRECT is fundamental for decent performance of virtualized I/O on fast storage so we can't avoid it to solve the race of put_page against split_huge_page_refcount to achieve a complete hugepage feature for KVM. Swap and oom works fine (well just like with regular pages ;). MMU notifier is handled transparently too, with the exception of the young bit on the pmd, that didn't have a range check but I think KVM will be fine because the whole point of hugepages is that EPT/NPT will also use a huge pmd when they notice gup returns pages with PageCompound set, so they won't care of a range and there's just the pmd young bit to check in that case. NOTE: in some cases if the L2 cache is small, this may slowdown and waste memory during COWs because 4M of memory are accessed in a single fault instead of 8k (the payoff is that after COW the program can run faster). So we might want to switch the copy_huge_page (and clear_huge_page too) to not temporal stores. I also extensively researched ways to avoid this cache trashing with a full prefault logic that would cow in 8k/16k/32k/64k up to 1M (I can send those patches that fully implemented prefault) but I concluded they're not worth it and they add an huge additional complexity and they remove all tlb benefits until the full hugepage has been faulted in, to save a little bit of memory and some cache during app startup, but they still don't improve substantially the cache-trashing during startup if the prefault happens in >4k chunks. One reason is that those 4k pte entries copied are still mapped on a perfectly cache-colored hugepage, so the trashing is the worst one can generate in those copies (cow of 4k page copies aren't so well colored so they trashes less, but again this results in software running faster after the page fault). Those prefault patches allowed things like a pte where post-cow pages were local 4k regular anon pages and the not-yet-cowed pte entries were pointing in the middle of some hugepage mapped read-only. If it doesn't payoff substantially with todays hardware it will payoff even less in the future with larger l2 caches, and the prefault logic would blot the VM a lot. If one is emebdded transparent_hugepage can be disabled during boot with sysfs or with the boot commandline parameter transparent_hugepage=0 (or transparent_hugepage=2 to restrict hugepages inside madvise regions) that will ensure not a single hugepage is allocated at boot time. It is simple enough to just disable transparent hugepage globally and let transparent hugepages be allocated selectively by applications in the MADV_HUGEPAGE region (both at page fault time, and if enabled with the collapse_huge_page too through the kernel daemon). This patch supports only hugepages mapped in the pmd, archs that have smaller hugepages will not fit in this patch alone. Also some archs like power have certain tlb limits that prevents mixing different page size in the same regions so they will not fit in this framework that requires "graceful fallback" to basic PAGE_SIZE in case of physical memory fragmentation. hugetlbfs remains a perfect fit for those because its software limits happen to match the hardware limits. hugetlbfs also remains a perfect fit for hugepage sizes like 1GByte that cannot be hoped to be found not fragmented after a certain system uptime and that would be very expensive to defragment with relocation, so requiring reservation. hugetlbfs is the "reservation way", the point of transparent hugepages is not to have any reservation at all and maximizing the use of cache and hugepages at all times automatically. Some performance result: vmx andrea # LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libhugetlbfs.so HUGETLB_MORECORE=yes HUGETLB_PATH=/mnt/huge/ ./largep ages3 memset page fault 1566023 memset tlb miss 453854 memset second tlb miss 453321 random access tlb miss 41635 random access second tlb miss 41658 vmx andrea # LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libhugetlbfs.so HUGETLB_MORECORE=yes HUGETLB_PATH=/mnt/huge/ ./largepages3 memset page fault 1566471 memset tlb miss 453375 memset second tlb miss 453320 random access tlb miss 41636 random access second tlb miss 41637 vmx andrea # ./largepages3 memset page fault 1566642 memset tlb miss 453417 memset second tlb miss 453313 random access tlb miss 41630 random access second tlb miss 41647 vmx andrea # ./largepages3 memset page fault 1566872 memset tlb miss 453418 memset second tlb miss 453315 random access tlb miss 41618 random access second tlb miss 41659 vmx andrea # echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/transparent_hugepage vmx andrea # ./largepages3 memset page fault 2182476 memset tlb miss 460305 memset second tlb miss 460179 random access tlb miss 44483 random access second tlb miss 44186 vmx andrea # ./largepages3 memset page fault 2182791 memset tlb miss 460742 memset second tlb miss 459962 random access tlb miss 43981 random access second tlb miss 43988 ============ #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/time.h> #define SIZE (3UL*1024*1024*1024) int main() { char *p = malloc(SIZE), *p2; struct timeval before, after; gettimeofday(&before, NULL); memset(p, 0, SIZE); gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("memset page fault %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); gettimeofday(&before, NULL); memset(p, 0, SIZE); gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("memset tlb miss %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); gettimeofday(&before, NULL); memset(p, 0, SIZE); gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("memset second tlb miss %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); gettimeofday(&before, NULL); for (p2 = p; p2 < p+SIZE; p2 += 4096) *p2 = 0; gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("random access tlb miss %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); gettimeofday(&before, NULL); for (p2 = p; p2 < p+SIZE; p2 += 4096) *p2 = 0; gettimeofday(&after, NULL); printf("random access second tlb miss %Lu\n", (after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL + after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec); return 0; } ============ Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	2011-01-13 17:32:42 -08:00