Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm: replace remap_file_pages() syscall with emulation

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu,  8 May 2014 15:41:28 +0300 "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com> wrote:

> remap_file_pages(2) was invented to be able efficiently map parts of
> huge file into limited 32-bit virtual address space such as in database
> workloads.
> 
> Nonlinear mappings are pain to support and it seems there's no
> legitimate use-cases nowadays since 64-bit systems are widely available.
> 
> Let's drop it and get rid of all these special-cased code.
> 
> The patch replaces the syscall with emulation which creates new VMA on
> each remap_file_pages(), unless they it can be merged with an adjacent
> one.
> 
> I didn't find *any* real code that uses remap_file_pages(2) to test
> emulation impact on. I've checked Debian code search and source of all
> packages in ALT Linux. No real users: libc wrappers, mentions in strace,
> gdb, valgrind and this kind of stuff.
> 
> There are few basic tests in LTP for the syscall. They work just fine
> with emulation.
> 
> To test performance impact, I've written small test case which
> demonstrate pretty much worst case scenario: map 4G shmfs file, write to
> begin of every page pgoff of the page, remap pages in reverse order,
> read every page.
> 
> The test creates 1 million of VMAs if emulation is in use, so I had to
> set vm.max_map_count to 1100000 to avoid -ENOMEM.
> 
> Before:		23.3 ( +-  4.31% ) seconds
> After:		43.9 ( +-  0.85% ) seconds
> Slowdown:	1.88x
> 
> I believe we can live with that.
> 

There's still all the special-case goop around the place to be cleaned
up - VM_NONLINEAR is a decent search term.  As is "grep nonlinear
mm/*.c".  And although this cleanup is the main reason for the
patchset, let's not do it now - we can do all that if/after this patch
get merged.

I'll queue the patches for some linux-next exposure and shall send
[1/2] Linuswards for 3.16 if nothing terrible happens.  Once we've
sorted out the too-many-vmas issue we'll need to work out when to merge
[2/2].


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