Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/2] Swap-out small-sized THP without splitting

[Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com>]

On 11/10/2023 07:37, Huang, Ying wrote:
> Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> writes:
> 
>> Hi All,
>>
>> This is an RFC for a small series to add support for swapping out small-sized
>> THP without needing to first split the large folio via __split_huge_page(). It
>> closely follows the approach already used by PMD-sized THP.
>>
>> "Small-sized THP" is an upcoming feature that enables performance improvements
>> by allocating large folios for anonymous memory, where the large folio size is
>> smaller than the traditional PMD-size. See [1].
>>
>> In some circumstances I've observed a performance regression (see patch 2 for
>> details), and this series is an attempt to fix the regression in advance of
>> merging small-sized THP support.
>>
>> I've done what I thought was the smallest change possible, and as a result, this
>> approach is only employed when the swap is backed by a non-rotating block device
>> (just as PMD-sized THP is supported today). However, I have a few questions on
>> whether we should consider relaxing those requirements in certain circumstances:
>>
>>
>> 1) block-backed vs file-backed
>> ==============================
>>
>> The code only attempts to allocate a contiguous set of entries if swap is backed
>> by a block device (i.e. not file-backed). The original commit, f0eea189e8e9
>> ("mm, THP, swap: don't allocate huge cluster for file backed swap device"),
>> stated "It's hard to write a whole transparent huge page (THP) to a file backed
>> swap device". But didn't state why. Does this imply there is a size limit at
>> which it becomes hard? And does that therefore imply that for "small enough"
>> sizes we should now allow use with file-back swap?
>>
>> This original commit was subsequently fixed with commit 41663430588c ("mm, THP,
>> swap: fix allocating cluster for swapfile by mistake"), which said the original
>> commit was using the wrong flag to determine if it was a block device and
>> therefore in some cases was actually doing large allocations for a file-backed
>> swap device, and this was causing file-system corruption. But that implies some
>> sort of correctness issue to me, rather than the performance issue I inferred
>> from the original commit.
>>
>> If anyone can offer an explanation, that would be helpful in determining if we
>> should allow some large sizes for file-backed swap.
> 
> swap use 'swap extent' (swap_info_struct.swap_extent_root) to map from
> swap offset to storage block number.  For block-backed swap, the mapping
> is pure linear.  So, you can use arbitrary large page size.  But for
> file-backed swap, only PAGE_SIZE alignment is guaranteed.

Ahh, I see, so its a correctness issue then. Thanks!


> 
>> 2) rotating vs non-rotating
>> ===========================
>>
>> I notice that the clustered approach is only used for non-rotating swap. That
>> implies that for rotating media, we will always fail a large allocation, and
>> fall back to splitting THPs to single pages. Which implies that the regression
>> I'm fixing here may still be present on rotating media? Or perhaps rotating disk
>> is so slow that the cost of writing the data out dominates the cost of
>> splitting?
>>
>> I considered that potentially the free swap entry search algorithm that is used
>> in this case could be modified to look for (small) contiguous runs of entries;
>> Up to ~16 pages (order-4) could be done by doing 2x 64bit reads from map instead
>> of single byte.
>>
>> I haven't looked into this idea in detail, but wonder if anybody thinks it is
>> worth the effort? Or perhaps it would end up causing bad fragmentation.
> 
> I doubt anybody will use rotating storage to back swap now.

I'm often using a QEMU VM for testing with an Ubuntu install. The disk is
enumerating as rotating storage and the swap device is file-backed. But I guess
the former issue at least, is me setting up QEMU with the incorrect options.

> 
>> Finally on testing, I've run the mm selftests and see no regressions, but I
>> don't think there is anything in there specifically aimed towards swap? Are
>> there any functional or performance tests that I should run? It would certainly
>> be good to confirm I haven't regressed PMD-size THP swap performance.
> 
> I have used swap sub test case of vm-scalbility to test.
> 
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/vm-scalability.git/

Great - I shall take a look!

> 
> --
> Best Regards,
> Huang, Ying