Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] Optimize rss_stat initialization/teardown for single-threaded tasks

[Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>]

On 2025-12-01 06:31, Mateusz Guzik wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2025 at 11:39 AM Harry Yoo <harry.yoo@oracle.com> wrote:
>> Apologies for not reposting it for a while. I have limited capacity to push
>> this forward right now, but FYI... I just pushed slab-destructor-rfc-v2r2-wip
>> branch after rebasing it onto the latest slab/for-next.
>>
>> https://gitlab.com/hyeyoo/linux/-/commits/slab-destructor-rfc-v2r2-wip?ref_type=heads
>>
> 
> nice, thanks. This takes care of majority of the needful(tm).
> 
> To reiterate, should something like this land, it is going to address
> the multicore scalability concern for single-threaded processes better
> than the patchset by Gabriel thanks to also taking care of cid. Bonus
> points for handling creation and teardown of multi-threaded processes.
> 
> However, this is still going to suffer from doing a full cpu walk on
> process exit. As I described earlier the current handling can be
> massively depessimized by reimplementing this to take care of all 4
> counters in each iteration, instead of walking everything 4 times.
> This is still going to be slower than not doing the walk at all, but
> it may be fast enough that Gabriel's patchset is no longer
> justifiable.
> 
> But then the test box is "only" 256 hw threads, what about bigger boxes?
> 
> Given my previous note about increased use of multithreading in
> userspace, the more concerned you happen to be about such a walk, the
> more you want an actual solution which takes care of multithreaded
> processes.
> 
> Additionally one has to assume per-cpu memory will be useful for other
> facilities down the line, making such a walk into an even bigger
> problem.
> 
> Thus ultimately *some* tracking of whether given mm was ever active on
> a given cpu is needed, preferably cheaply implemented at least for the
> context switch code. Per what I described in another e-mail, one way
> to do it would be to coalesce it with tlb handling by changing how the
> bitmap tracking is handled -- having 2 adjacent bits denote cpu usage
> + tlb separately. For the common case this should be almost the code
> to set the two. Iteration for tlb shootdowns would be less efficient
> but that's probably tolerable. Maybe there is a better way, I did not
> put much thought into it. I just claim sooner or later this will need
> to get solved. At the same time would be a bummer to add stopgaps
> without even trying.
> 
> With the cpu tracking problem solved, check_mm would visit few cpus in
> the benchmark (probably just 1) and it would be faster single-threaded
> than the proposed patch *and* would retain that for processes which
> went multithreaded.
Looking at this problem, it appears to be a good fit for rseq mm_cid
(per-mm concurrency ids). Let me explain.

I originally implemented the rseq mm_cid for userspace. It keeps track
of max_mm_cid = min(nr_threads, nr_allowed_cpus) for each mm, and lets
the scheduler select a current mm_cid value within the range
[0 .. max_mm_cid - 1]. With Thomas Gleixner's rewrite (currently in
tip), we even have hooks in thread clone/exit where we know when
max_mm_cid is increased/decreased for a mm. So we could keep track of
the maximum value of max_mm_cid over the lifetime of a mm.

So using mm_cid for per-mm rss counter would involve:

- Still allocating memory per-cpu on mm allocation (nr_cpu_ids), but
   without zeroing all that memory (we eliminate a possible cpus walk on
   allocation).

- Initialize CPU counters on thread clone when max_mm_cid is increased.
   Keep track of the max value of max_mm_cid over mm lifetime.

- Rather than using the per-cpu accessors to access the counters, we
   would have to load the per-task mm_cid field to get the counter index.
   This would have a slight added overhead on the fast path, because we
   would change a segment-selector prefix operation for an access that
   depends on a load of the task struct current mm_cid index.

- Iteration on all possible cpus at process exit is replaced by an
   iteration on mm maximum max_mm_cid, which will be bound by
   the maximum value of min(nr_threads, nr_allowed_cpus) over the
   mm lifetime. This iteration should be done with the new mm_cid
   mutex held across thread clone/exit.

One more downside to consider is loss of NUMA locality, because the
index used to access the per-cpu memory would not take into account
the hardware topology. The index to topology should stay stable for
a given mm, but if we mix the memory allocation of per-cpu data
across different mm, then the NUMA locality would be degraded.
Ideally we'd have a per-cpu allocator with per-mm arenas for mm_cid
indexing if we care about NUMA locality.

So let's say you have a 256-core machine, where cpu numbers can go
from 0 to 255, with a 4-thread process, mm_cid will be limited to
the range [0..3]. Likewise if there are tons of threads in a process
limited to a few cores (e.g. pinned on cores from 10 to 19), which
will limit the range to [0..9].

This approach solves the runtime overhead issue of zeroing per-cpu
memory for all scenarios:

* single-threaded: index = 0

* nr_threads < nr_cpu_ids
   * nr_threads < nr_allowed_cpus: index = [0 .. nr_threads - 1]
   * nr_threads >= nr_allowed_cpus: index = [0 .. nr_allowed_cpus - 1]

* nr_threads >= nr_cpus_ids: index = [0 .. nr_cpu_ids - 1]

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
https://www.efficios.com