Re: [PATCH v3] mm: Avoid unnecessary page fault retires on shared memory types

[Ingo Molnar]

* Peter Xu <peterx@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> This patch provides a ~12% perf boost on my aarch64 test VM with a simple
> program sequentially dirtying 400MB shmem file being mmap()ed and these are
> the time it needs:
>
>   Before: 650.980 ms (+-1.94%)
>   After:  569.396 ms (+-1.38%)

Nice!

>  arch/x86/mm/fault.c           |  4 ++++

Reviewed-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx>

Minor comment typo:

> +		/*
> +		 * We should do the same as VM_FAULT_RETRY, but let's not
> +		 * return -EBUSY since that's not reflecting the reality on
> +		 * what has happened - we've just fully completed a page
> +		 * fault, with the mmap lock released.  Use -EAGAIN to show
> +		 * that we want to take the mmap lock _again_.
> +		 */

s/reflecting the reality on what has happened
 /reflecting the reality of what has happened

>  	ret = handle_mm_fault(vma, address, fault_flags, NULL);
> +
> +	if (ret & VM_FAULT_COMPLETED) {
> +		/*
> +		 * NOTE: it's a pity that we need to retake the lock here
> +		 * to pair with the unlock() in the callers. Ideally we
> +		 * could tell the callers so they do not need to unlock.
> +		 */
> +		mmap_read_lock(mm);
> +		*unlocked = true;
> +		return 0;

Indeed that's a pity - I guess more performance could be gained here, 
especially in highly parallel threaded workloads?

Thanks,

	Ingo