Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] THP eligibility reporting via proc

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Fri Dec 07 2018 - 05:55:59 EST


On Tue 20-11-18 11:35:12, Michal Hocko wrote:
> Hi,
> this series of three patches aims at making THP eligibility reporting
> much more robust and long term sustainable. The trigger for the change
> is a regression report [1] and the long follow up discussion. In short
> the specific application didn't have good API to query whether a particular
> mapping can be backed by THP so it has used VMA flags to workaround that.
> These flags represent a deep internal state of VMAs and as such they should
> be used by userspace with a great deal of caution.
>
> A similar has happened for [2] when users complained that VM_MIXEDMAP is
> no longer set on DAX mappings. Again a lack of a proper API led to an
> abuse.
>
> The first patch in the series tries to emphasise that that the semantic
> of flags might change and any application consuming those should be really
> careful.
>
> The remaining two patches provide a more suitable interface to address [1]
> and provide a consistent API to query the THP status both for each VMA
> and process wide as well.

Are there any other comments on these? I haven't heard any pushback so
far so I will re-send with RFC dropped early next week.

>
> [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/http://lkml.kernel.org/r/alpine.DEB.2.21.1809241054050.224429@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181002100531.GC4135@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs