Re: [PATCH] hugepage: allow parallelization of the hugepage faultpath

From: Hush Bensen
Date: Tue Jul 23 2013 - 03:05:20 EST


On 07/18/2013 05:07 PM, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 12:50:25PM -0700, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:

From: Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr.bueso@xxxxxx>

- Cleaned up and forward ported to Linus' latest.
- Cache aligned mutexes.
- Keep non SMP systems using a single mutex.

It was found that this mutex can become quite contended
during the early phases of large databases which make use of huge pages - for instance
startup and initial runs. One clear example is a 1.5Gb Oracle database, where lockstat
reports that this mutex can be one of the top 5 most contended locks in the kernel during
the first few minutes:

hugetlb_instantiation_mutex: 10678 10678
---------------------------
hugetlb_instantiation_mutex 10678 [<ffffffff8115e14e>] hugetlb_fault+0x9e/0x340
---------------------------
hugetlb_instantiation_mutex 10678 [<ffffffff8115e14e>] hugetlb_fault+0x9e/0x340

contentions: 10678
acquisitions: 99476
waittime-total: 76888911.01 us
Hello,
I have a question :)

So, each contention takes 7.6 ms in your result.
Do you map this area with VM_NORESERVE?
If we map with VM_RESERVE, when page fault, we just dequeue a huge page from a queue and clear
a page and then map it to a page table. So I guess, it shouldn't take so long.

I don't think there is clear page operation after dequeue huge page, actually it's even not done during hugetlb_reserve_pages, do you know why? There is just clear operation in hugetlb_no_page.

I'm wondering why it takes so long.

And do you use 16KB-size hugepage?
If so, region handling could takes some times. If you access the area as random order,
the number of region can be more than 90000. I guess, this can be one reason to too long
waittime.

Thanks.

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