Re: [PATCH v3 2/2] mm, thp: avoid unnecessary swapin in khugepaged

From: Vlastimil Babka
Date: Thu Mar 17 2016 - 07:07:56 EST


On 03/14/2016 10:40 PM, Ebru Akagunduz wrote:
Currently khugepaged makes swapin readahead to improve
THP collapse rate. This patch checks vm statistics
to avoid workload of swapin, if unnecessary. So that
when system under pressure, khugepaged won't consume
resources to swapin.

The patch was tested with a test program that allocates
800MB of memory, writes to it, and then sleeps. The system
was forced to swap out all. Afterwards, the test program
touches the area by writing, it skips a page in each
20 pages of the area. When waiting to swapin readahead
left part of the test, the memory forced to be busy
doing page reclaim. There was enough free memory during
test, khugepaged did not swapin readahead due to business.

Test results:

After swapped out
-------------------------------------------------------------------
| Anonymous | AnonHugePages | Swap | Fraction |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
With patch | 206608 kB | 204800 kB | 593392 kB | %99 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Without patch | 351308 kB | 350208 kB | 448692 kB | %99 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------

After swapped in (waiting 10 minutes)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
| Anonymous | AnonHugePages | Swap | Fraction |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
With patch | 551992 kB | 368640 kB | 248008 kB | %66 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Without patch | 586816 kB | 464896 kB | 213184 kB | %79 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Signed-off-by: Ebru Akagunduz <ebru.akagunduz@xxxxxxxxx>

Looks like a step in a good direction. Still might be worthwile to also wait for the swapin to complete, and actually collapse immediately, no?

---
Changes in v2:
- Add reference to specify which patch fixed (Ebru Akagunduz)

The reference is again missing in v3.

- Fix commit subject line (Ebru Akagunduz)

Changes in v3:
- Remove default values of allocstall (Kirill A. Shutemov)

mm/huge_memory.c | 13 +++++++++++--
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/huge_memory.c b/mm/huge_memory.c
index 86e9666..67a398c 100644
--- a/mm/huge_memory.c
+++ b/mm/huge_memory.c
@@ -102,6 +102,7 @@ static DECLARE_WAIT_QUEUE_HEAD(khugepaged_wait);
*/
static unsigned int khugepaged_max_ptes_none __read_mostly;
static unsigned int khugepaged_max_ptes_swap __read_mostly;
+static unsigned long int allocstall;

"int" here is unnecessary


static int khugepaged(void *none);
static int khugepaged_slab_init(void);
@@ -2438,7 +2439,7 @@ static void collapse_huge_page(struct mm_struct *mm,
struct page *new_page;
spinlock_t *pmd_ptl, *pte_ptl;
int isolated = 0, result = 0;
- unsigned long hstart, hend;
+ unsigned long hstart, hend, swap, curr_allocstall;
struct mem_cgroup *memcg;
unsigned long mmun_start; /* For mmu_notifiers */
unsigned long mmun_end; /* For mmu_notifiers */
@@ -2493,7 +2494,14 @@ static void collapse_huge_page(struct mm_struct *mm,
goto out;
}

- __collapse_huge_page_swapin(mm, vma, address, pmd);
+ swap = get_mm_counter(mm, MM_SWAPENTS);
+ curr_allocstall = sum_vm_event(ALLOCSTALL);
+ /*
+ * When system under pressure, don't swapin readahead.
+ * So that avoid unnecessary resource consuming.
+ */
+ if (allocstall == curr_allocstall && swap != 0)
+ __collapse_huge_page_swapin(mm, vma, address, pmd);

anon_vma_lock_write(vma->anon_vma);

@@ -2790,6 +2798,7 @@ skip:
VM_BUG_ON(khugepaged_scan.address < hstart ||
khugepaged_scan.address + HPAGE_PMD_SIZE >
hend);
+ allocstall = sum_vm_event(ALLOCSTALL);

Why here? Rik said in v2:

Khugepaged stores the allocstall value when it goes to sleep,
and checks it before calling (or not) __collapse_huge_page_swapin.

But that's not true, this is not "when it goes to sleep".
So AFAICS it only observes the allocstalls between starting to scan a single pmd, and trying to collapse the pmd. So the window is quite tiny especially compared to I/O speeds, and this will IMHO catch only really frequent stalls. Placing it really at "when it goes to sleep" sounds better.

ret = khugepaged_scan_pmd(mm, vma,
khugepaged_scan.address,
hpage);