Re: [PATCH v12 3/6] mm: Introduce Reported pages

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

On Tue, 22 Oct 2019 15:28:12 -0700 Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@linux.intel.com>
> 
> In order to pave the way for free page reporting in virtualized
> environments we will need a way to get pages out of the free lists and
> identify those pages after they have been returned. To accomplish this,
> this patch adds the concept of a Reported Buddy, which is essentially
> meant to just be the Uptodate flag used in conjunction with the Buddy
> page type.
> 
> It adds a set of pointers we shall call "reported_boundary" which
> represent the upper boundary between the unreported and reported pages.
> The general idea is that in order for a page to cross from one side of the
> boundary to the other it will need to verify that it went through the
> reporting process. Ultimately a free list has been fully processed when
> the boundary has been moved from the tail all they way up to occupying the
> first entry in the list. Without this we would have to manually walk the
> entire page list until we have find a page that hasn't been reported. In my
> testing this adds as much as 18% additional overhead which would make this
> unattractive as a solution.
> 
> One limitation to this approach is that it is essentially a linear search
> and in the case of the free lists we can have pages added to either the
> head or the tail of the list. In order to place limits on this we only
> allow pages to be added before the reported_boundary instead of adding
> to the tail itself. An added advantage to this approach is that we should
> be reducing the overall memory footprint of the guest as it will be more
> likely to recycle warm pages versus trying to allocate the reported pages
> that were likely evicted from the guest memory.
> 
> Since we will only be reporting one zone at a time we keep the boundary
> limited to being defined for just the zone we are currently reporting pages
> from. Doing this we can keep the number of additional pointers needed quite
> small. To flag that the boundaries are in place we use a single bit
> in the zone to indicate that reporting and the boundaries are active.
> 
> We store the index of the boundary pointer used to track the reported page
> in the page->index value. Doing this we can avoid unnecessary computation
> to determine the index value again. There should be no issues with this as
> the value is unused when the page is in the buddy allocator, and is reset
> as soon as the page is removed from the free list.

This looks like quite a lot of new code in code MM.  Hence previous
"how valuable is this patchset" question!

Some silly trivia which I noticed while perusing:

>
> ...
>
> --- a/include/linux/mmzone.h
> +++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h
> @@ -470,6 +470,14 @@ struct zone {
>  	seqlock_t		span_seqlock;
>  #endif
>  
> +#ifdef CONFIG_PAGE_REPORTING
> +	/*
> +	 * Pointer to reported page tracking statistics array. The size of
> +	 * the array is MAX_ORDER - PAGE_REPORTING_MIN_ORDER. NULL when
> +	 * unused page reporting is not present.
> +	 */
> +	unsigned long		*reported_pages;

Dumb question.  Why not

	unsigned long reported_pages[MAX_ORDER - PAGE_REPORTING_MIN_ORDER];

> +#endif
>  	int initialized;
>  
>  	/* Write-intensive fields used from the page allocator */
>
> ...
>
> +#define page_is_reported(_page)	unlikely(PageReported(_page))

page_reported() would be more consistent.

>
> ...
>
> +static inline void
> +add_page_to_reported_list(struct page *page, struct zone *zone,
> +			  unsigned int order, unsigned int mt)
> +{
> +	/*
> +	 * Default to using index 0, this will be updated later if the zone
> +	 * is still being processed.
> +	 */
> +	page->index = 0;
> +
> +	/* flag page as reported */
> +	__SetPageReported(page);
> +
> +	/* update areated page accounting */
> +	zone->reported_pages[order - PAGE_REPORTING_MIN_ORDER]++;

nit.  This is an array, not a list.  The function name is a bit screwy.

> +}
> +
>
> ...
>