An IPI is sent to flush remote TLBs when a page is unmapped that was
potentially accesssed by other CPUs. There are many circumstances where
this happens but the obvious one is kswapd reclaiming pages belonging to a
running process as kswapd and the task are likely running on separate
CPUs.
On small machines, this is not a significant problem but as machine gets
larger with more cores and more memory, the cost of these IPIs can be
high. This patch uses a simple structure that tracks CPUs that
potentially have TLB entries for pages being unmapped. When the unmapping
is complete, the full TLB is flushed on the assumption that a refill cost
is lower than flushing individual entries.
Architectures wishing to do this must give the following guarantee.
If a clean page is unmapped and not immediately flushed, the
architecture must guarantee that a write to that linear address
from a CPU with a cached TLB entry will trap a page fault.
This is essentially what the kernel already depends on but the window is
much larger with this patch applied and is worth highlighting. The
architecture should consider whether the cost of the full TLB flush is
higher than sending an IPI to flush each individual entry. An additional
architecture helper called flush_tlb_local is required. It's a trivial
wrapper with some accounting in the x86 case.
The impact of this patch depends on the workload as measuring any benefit
requires both mapped pages co-located on the LRU and memory pressure. The
case with the biggest impact is multiple processes reading mapped pages
taken from the vm-scalability test suite. The test case uses NR_CPU
readers of mapped files that consume 10*RAM.
Linear mapped reader on a 4-node machine with 64G RAM and 48 CPUs
4.2.0-rc1 4.2.0-rc1
vanilla flushfull-v7
Ops lru-file-mmap-read-elapsed 159.62 ( 0.00%) 120.68 ( 24.40%)
Ops lru-file-mmap-read-time_range 30.59 ( 0.00%) 2.80 ( 90.85%)
Ops lru-file-mmap-read-time_stddv 6.70 ( 0.00%) 0.64 ( 90.38%)
4.2.0-rc1 4.2.0-rc1
vanilla flushfull-v7
User 581.00 611.43
System 5804.93 4111.76
Elapsed 161.03 122.12
This is showing that the readers completed 24.40% faster with 29% less
system CPU time. From vmstats, it is known that the vanilla kernel was
interrupted roughly 900K times per second during the steady phase of the
test and the patched kernel was interrupts 180K times per second.
The impact is lower on a single socket machine.
4.2.0-rc1 4.2.0-rc1
vanilla flushfull-v7
Ops lru-file-mmap-read-elapsed 25.33 ( 0.00%) 20.38 ( 19.54%)
Ops lru-file-mmap-read-time_range 0.91 ( 0.00%) 1.44 (-58.24%)
Ops lru-file-mmap-read-time_stddv 0.28 ( 0.00%) 0.47 (-65.34%)
4.2.0-rc1 4.2.0-rc1
vanilla flushfull-v7
User 58.09 57.64
System 111.82 76.56
Elapsed 27.29 22.55
It's still a noticeable improvement with vmstat showing interrupts went
from roughly 500K per second to 45K per second.
The patch will have no impact on workloads with no memory pressure or have
relatively few mapped pages. It will have an unpredictable impact on the
workload running on the CPU being flushed as it'll depend on how many TLB
entries need to be refilled and how long that takes. Worst case, the TLB
will be completely cleared of active entries when the target PFNs were not
resident at all.
[sasha.levin@oracle.com: trace tlb flush after disabling preemption in try_to_unmap_flush]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sasha.levin@oracle.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
72b252aed5