Huge page helps to reduce TLB miss rate, but it has higher cache
footprint, sometimes this may cause some issue. For example, when
copying huge page on x86_64 platform, the cache footprint is 4M. 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 contention is heavy when copying the huge page, and we copy
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 copying the
end of the huge page. And it is possible for the application to access
the begin of the huge page after copying the huge page.
In c79b57e462 ("mm: hugetlb: clear target sub-page last when clearing
huge page"), to keep the cache lines of the target subpage hot, the
order to clear the subpages in the huge page in clear_huge_page() is
changed to clearing the subpage which is furthest from the target
subpage firstly, and the target subpage last. The similar order
changing helps huge page copying too. That is implemented in this
patch. Because we have put the order algorithm into a separate
function, the implementation is quite simple.
The patch is a generic optimization which should benefit quite some
workloads, not for a specific use case. To demonstrate the performance
benefit of the patch, we tested it with vm-scalability run on
transparent huge page.
With this patch, the throughput increases ~16.6% in vm-scalability
anon-cow-seq test case with 36 processes on a 2 socket Xeon E5 v3 2699
system (36 cores, 72 threads). The test case set
/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled to be always, mmap() a big
anonymous memory area and populate it, then forked 36 child processes,
each writes to the anonymous memory area from the begin to the end, so
cause copy on write. For each child process, other child processes
could be seen as other workloads which generate heavy cache pressure.
At the same time, the IPC (instruction per cycle) increased from 0.63 to
0.78, and the time spent in user space is reduced ~7.2%.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180524005851.4079-3-ying.huang@intel.com
Signed-off-by: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi.kleen@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
Cc: Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
c9f4cd7138