Re: [PATCH v2 01/14] mm: Batch-copy PTE ranges during fork()

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

On 28/11/2023 21:06, Barry Song wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 11:49 PM Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 28/11/2023 09:49, Barry Song wrote:
>>> On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 10:14 PM Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 27/11/2023 20:34, Barry Song wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 12:07 AM Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 27/11/2023 10:28, Barry Song wrote:
>>>>>>> On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 11:11 PM Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 27/11/2023 09:59, Barry Song wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 10:35 PM Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> On 27/11/2023 08:42, Barry Song wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +           for (i = 0; i < nr; i++, page++) {
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                   if (anon) {
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                           /*
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                            * If this page may have been pinned by the
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                            * parent process, copy the page immediately for
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                            * the child so that we'll always guarantee the
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                            * pinned page won't be randomly replaced in the
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                            * future.
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                            */
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                           if (unlikely(page_try_dup_anon_rmap(
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                                           page, false, src_vma))) {
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                                   if (i != 0)
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                                           break;
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                                   /* Page may be pinned, we have to copy. */
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                                   return copy_present_page(
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                                           dst_vma, src_vma, dst_pte,
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                                           src_pte, addr, rss, prealloc,
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                                           page);
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                           }
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                           rss[MM_ANONPAGES]++;
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                           VM_BUG_ON(PageAnonExclusive(page));
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                   } else {
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                           page_dup_file_rmap(page, false);
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                           rss[mm_counter_file(page)]++;
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +                   }
>>>>>>>>>>>>>             }
>>>>>>>>>>>>> -           rss[MM_ANONPAGES]++;
>>>>>>>>>>>>> -   } else if (page) {
>>>>>>>>>>>>> -           folio_get(folio);
>>>>>>>>>>>>> -           page_dup_file_rmap(page, false);
>>>>>>>>>>>>> -           rss[mm_counter_file(page)]++;
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +           nr = i;
>>>>>>>>>>>>> +           folio_ref_add(folio, nr);
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> You're changing the order of mapcount vs. refcount increment. Don't.
>>>>>>>>>>>> Make sure your refcount >= mapcount.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> You can do that easily by doing the folio_ref_add(folio, nr) first and
>>>>>>>>>>>> then decrementing in case of error accordingly. Errors due to pinned
>>>>>>>>>>>> pages are the corner case.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> I'll note that it will make a lot of sense to have batch variants of
>>>>>>>>>>>> page_try_dup_anon_rmap() and page_dup_file_rmap().
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> i still don't understand why it is not a entire map+1, but an increment
>>>>>>>>>>> in each basepage.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Because we are PTE-mapping the folio, we have to account each individual page.
>>>>>>>>>> If we accounted the entire folio, where would we unaccount it? Each page can be
>>>>>>>>>> unmapped individually (e.g. munmap() part of the folio) so need to account each
>>>>>>>>>> page. When PMD mapping, the whole thing is either mapped or unmapped, and its
>>>>>>>>>> atomic, so we can account the entire thing.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Hi Ryan,
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> There is no problem. for example, a large folio is entirely mapped in
>>>>>>>>> process A with CONPTE,
>>>>>>>>> and only page2 is mapped in process B.
>>>>>>>>> then we will have
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> entire_map = 0
>>>>>>>>> page0.map = -1
>>>>>>>>> page1.map = -1
>>>>>>>>> page2.map = 0
>>>>>>>>> page3.map = -1
>>>>>>>>> ....
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> as long as it is a CONTPTE large folio, there is no much difference with
>>>>>>>>>>> PMD-mapped large folio. it has all the chance to be DoubleMap and need
>>>>>>>>>>> split.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> When A and B share a CONTPTE large folio, we do madvise(DONTNEED) or any
>>>>>>>>>>> similar things on a part of the large folio in process A,
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> this large folio will have partially mapped subpage in A (all CONTPE bits
>>>>>>>>>>> in all subpages need to be removed though we only unmap a part of the
>>>>>>>>>>> large folioas HW requires consistent CONTPTEs); and it has entire map in
>>>>>>>>>>> process B(all PTEs are still CONPTES in process B).
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> isn't it more sensible for this large folios to have entire_map = 0(for
>>>>>>>>>>> process B), and subpages which are still mapped in process A has map_count
>>>>>>>>>>> =0? (start from -1).
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> Especially, the batch variant of page_try_dup_anon_rmap() would only
>>>>>>>>>>>> check once if the folio maybe pinned, and in that case, you can simply
>>>>>>>>>>>> drop all references again. So you either have all or no ptes to process,
>>>>>>>>>>>> which makes that code easier.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> I'm afraid this doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps I've misunderstood. But
>>>>>>>>>> fundamentally you can only use entire_mapcount if its only possible to map and
>>>>>>>>>> unmap the whole folio atomically.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> My point is that CONTPEs should either all-set in all 16 PTEs or all are dropped
>>>>>>>>> in 16 PTEs. if all PTEs have CONT, it is entirely mapped; otherwise,
>>>>>>>>> it is partially
>>>>>>>>> mapped. if a large folio is mapped in one processes with all CONTPTEs
>>>>>>>>> and meanwhile in another process with partial mapping(w/o CONTPTE), it is
>>>>>>>>> DoubleMapped.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> There are 2 problems with your proposal, as I see it;
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> 1) the core-mm is not enlightened for CONTPTE mappings. As far as it is
>>>>>>>> concerned, its just mapping a bunch of PTEs. So it has no hook to inc/dec
>>>>>>>> entire_mapcount. The arch code is opportunistically and *transparently* managing
>>>>>>>> the CONT_PTE bit.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> 2) There is nothing to say a folio isn't *bigger* than the contpte block; it may
>>>>>>>> be 128K and be mapped with 2 contpte blocks. Or even a PTE-mapped THP (2M) and
>>>>>>>> be mapped with 32 contpte blocks. So you can't say it is entirely mapped
>>>>>>>> unless/until ALL of those blocks are set up. And then of course each block could
>>>>>>>> be unmapped unatomically.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> For the PMD case there are actually 2 properties that allow using the
>>>>>>>> entire_mapcount optimization; It's atomically mapped/unmapped through the PMD
>>>>>>>> and we know that the folio is exactly PMD sized (since it must be at least PMD
>>>>>>>> sized to be able to map it with the PMD, and we don't allocate THPs any bigger
>>>>>>>> than PMD size). So one PMD map or unmap operation corresponds to exactly one
>>>>>>>> *entire* map or unmap. That is not true when we are PTE mapping.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> well. Thanks for clarification. based on the above description, i agree the
>>>>>>> current code might make more sense by always using mapcount in subpage.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I gave my proposals as  I thought we were always CONTPTE size for small-THP
>>>>>>> then we could drop the loop to iterate 16 times rmap. if we do it
>>>>>>> entirely, we only
>>>>>>> need to do dup rmap once for all 16 PTEs by increasing entire_map.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Well its always good to have the discussion - so thanks for the ideas. I think
>>>>>> there is a bigger question lurking here; should we be exposing the concept of
>>>>>> contpte mappings to the core-mm rather than burying it in the arm64 arch code?
>>>>>> I'm confident that would be a huge amount of effort and the end result would be
>>>>>> similar performace to what this approach gives. One potential benefit of letting
>>>>>> core-mm control it is that it would also give control to core-mm over the
>>>>>> granularity of access/dirty reporting (my approach implicitly ties it to the
>>>>>> folio). Having sub-folio access tracking _could_ potentially help with future
>>>>>> work to make THP size selection automatic, but we are not there yet, and I think
>>>>>> there are other (simpler) ways to achieve the same thing. So my view is that
>>>>>> _not_ exposing it to core-mm is the right way for now.
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi Ryan,
>>>>>
>>>>> We(OPPO) started a similar project like you even before folio was imported to
>>>>> mainline, we have deployed the dynamic hugepage(that is how we name it)
>>>>> on millions of mobile phones on real products and kernels before 5.16,  making
>>>>> a huge success on performance improvement. for example, you may
>>>>> find the out-of-tree 5.15 source code here
>>>>
>>>> Oh wow, thanks for reaching out and explaining this - I have to admit I feel
>>>> embarrassed that I clearly didn't do enough research on the prior art because I
>>>> wasn't aware of your work. So sorry about that.
>>>>
>>>> I sensed that you had a different model for how this should work vs what I've
>>>> implemented and now I understand why :). I'll review your stuff and I'm sure
>>>> I'll have questions. I'm sure each solution has pros and cons.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> https://github.com/OnePlusOSS/android_kernel_oneplus_sm8550/tree/oneplus/sm8550_u_14.0.0_oneplus11
>>>>>
>>>>> Our modification might not be so clean and has lots of workarounds
>>>>> just for the stability of products
>>>>>
>>>>> We mainly have
>>>>>
>>>>> 1. https://github.com/OnePlusOSS/android_kernel_oneplus_sm8550/blob/oneplus/sm8550_u_14.0.0_oneplus11/mm/cont_pte_hugepage.c
>>>>>
>>>>> some CONTPTE helpers
>>>>>
>>>>> 2.https://github.com/OnePlusOSS/android_kernel_oneplus_sm8550/blob/oneplus/sm8550_u_14.0.0_oneplus11/include/linux/mm.h
>>>>>
>>>>> some Dynamic Hugepage APIs
>>>>>
>>>>> 3. https://github.com/OnePlusOSS/android_kernel_oneplus_sm8550/blob/oneplus/sm8550_u_14.0.0_oneplus11/mm/memory.c
>>>>>
>>>>> modified all page faults to support
>>>>>      (1). allocation of hugepage of 64KB in do_anon_page
>>>>
>>>> My Small-Sized THP patch set is handling the equivalent of this.
>>>
>>> right, the only difference is that we did a huge-zeropage for reading
>>> in do_anon_page.
>>> mapping all large folios to CONTPTE to zero page.
>>
>> FWIW, I took a slightly different approach in my original RFC for the zero page
>> - although I ripped it all out to simplify for the initial series. I found that
>> it was pretty rare for user space to read multiple consecutive pages without
>> ever interleving any writes, so I kept the zero page as a base page, but at CoW,
>> I would expand the allocation to an approprately sized THP. But for the couple
>> of workloads that I've gone deep with, I found that it made barely any dent on
>> the amount of memory that ended up contpte-mapped; the vast majority was from
>> write allocation in do_anonymous_page().
> 
> the problem is even if there is only one page read in 16 ptes, you
> will map the page to
> zero basepage. then while you write another page in these 16 ptes, you
> lose the chance
> to become large folio as pte_range_none() becomes false.
> 
> if we map these 16ptes to contpte zero page, in do_wp_page, we have a
> good chance
> to CoW and get a large anon folio.

Yes understood. I think we are a bit off-topic for this patch set though.
small-sized THP zero pages can be tackled as a separate series once these
initial series are in. I'd be happy to review a small-sized THP zero page post :)

> 
>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>      (2). CoW hugepage in do_wp_page
>>>>
>>>> This isn't handled yet in my patch set; the original RFC implemented it but I
>>>> removed it in order to strip back to the essential complexity for the initial
>>>> submission. DavidH has been working on a precise shared vs exclusive map
>>>> tracking mechanism - if that goes in, it will make CoWing large folios simpler.
>>>> Out of interest, what workloads benefit most from this?
>>>
>>> as a phone, Android has a design almost all processes are forked from zygote.
>>> thus, CoW happens quite often to all apps.
>>
>> Sure. But in my analysis I concluded that most of the memory mapped in zygote is
>> file-backed and mostly RO so therefore doing THP CoW doesn't help much. Perhaps
>> there are cases where that conclusion is wrong.
> 
> CoW is much less than do_anon_page on my phone which is running dynamic
> hugepage for a couple of hours:
> 
> OP52D1L1:/ # cat /proc/cont_pte_hugepage/stat
> ...
> thp_cow 34669                           ---- CoW a large folio
> thp_do_anon_pages 1032362     -----  a large folio in do_anon_page
> ...
> 
> so it is around 34669/1032362 = 3.35%.

well its actually 34669 / (34669 + 1032362) = 3.25%. But, yes, the point is that
very few of large folios are lost due to CoW so there is likely to be little
perf impact. Again, I'd happily review a series that enables this!

> 
>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>      (3). copy CONPTEs in copy_pte_range
>>>>
>>>> As discussed this is done as part of the contpte patch set, but its not just a
>>>> simple copy; the arch code will notice and set the CONT_PTE bit as needed.
>>>
>>> right, i have read all your unfold and fold stuff today, now i understand your
>>> approach seems quite nice!
>>
>> Great - thanks!
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>      (4). allocate and swap-in Hugepage as a whole in do_swap_page
>>>>
>>>> This is going to be a problem but I haven't even looked at this properly yet.
>>>> The advice so far has been to continue to swap-in small pages only, but improve
>>>> khugepaged to collapse to small-sized THP. I'll take a look at your code to
>>>> understand how you did this.
>>>
>>> this is also crucial to android phone as swap is always happening
>>> on an embedded device. if we don't support large folios in swapin,
>>> our large folios will never come back after it is swapped-out.
>>>
>>> and i hated the collapse solution from the first beginning as there is
>>> never a guarantee to succeed and its overhead is unacceptable to user UI,
>>> so we supported hugepage allocation in do_swap_page from the first beginning.
>>
>> Understood. I agree it would be nice to preserve large folios across swap. I
>> think this can be layered on top of the current work though.
> 
> This will be my first priority to use your large folio code on phones.
> We need a patchset
> on top of yours :-)
> 
> without it, we will likely fail. Typically, one phone can have a 4~8GB
> zRAM to compress
> a lot of anon pages, if the compression ratio is 1:4, that means
> uncompressed anon
> pages are much much more. Thus, while the background app is switched back
> to foreground, we need those swapped-out large folios back rather than getting
> small basepages replacement. swap-in basepage is definitely not going to
> work well on a phone, neither does THP collapse.

Yep understood. From the other thread, it sounds like you are preparing a series
for large swap-in - looking forward to seeing it!

> 
>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 4. https://github.com/OnePlusOSS/android_kernel_oneplus_sm8550/blob/oneplus/sm8550_u_14.0.0_oneplus11/mm/vmscan.c
>>>>> https://github.com/OnePlusOSS/android_kernel_oneplus_sm8550/blob/oneplus/sm8550_u_14.0.0_oneplus11/mm/rmap.c
>>>>>
>>>>> reclaim hugepage as a whole and LRU optimization for 64KB dynamic hugepage.
>>>>
>>>> I think this is all naturally handled by the folio code that exists in modern
>>>> kernels?
>>>
>>> We had a CONTPTE hugepage pool, if the pool is very limited, we let LRU
>>> reclaim large folios to the pool. as phones are running lots of apps
>>> and drivers, and the memory is very limited, after a couple of hours,
>>> it will become very hard to allocate large folios in the original buddy. thus,
>>> large folios totally disappeared after running the phone for some time
>>> if we didn't have the pool.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> So we are 100% interested in your patchset and hope it can find a way
>>>>> to land on the
>>>>> mainline, thus decreasing all the cost we have to maintain out-of-tree
>>>>> code from a
>>>>> kernel to another kernel version which we have done on a couple of
>>>>> kernel versions
>>>>> before 5.16. Firmly, we are 100% supportive of large anon folios
>>>>> things you are leading.
>>>>
>>>> That's great to hear! Of course Reviewed-By's and Tested-By's will all help move
>>>> it closer :). If you had any ability to do any A/B performance testing, it would
>>>> be very interesting to see how this stacks up against your solution - if there
>>>> are gaps it would be good to know where and develop a plan to plug the gap.
>>>>
>>>
>>> sure.
>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> A big pain was we found lots of races especially on CONTPTE unfolding
>>>>> and especially a part
>>>>> of basepages ran away from the 16 CONPTEs group since userspace is
>>>>> always working
>>>>> on basepages, having no idea of small-THP.  We ran our code on millions of
>>>>> real phones, and now we have got them fixed (or maybe "can't reproduce"),
>>>>> no outstanding issue.
>>>>
>>>> I'm going to be brave and say that my solution shouldn't suffer from these
>>>> problems; but of course the proof is only in the testing. I did a lot of work
>>>> with our architecture group and micro architects to determine exactly what is
>>>> and isn't safe; We even tightened the Arm ARM spec very subtlely to allow the
>>>> optimization in patch 13 (see the commit log for details). Of course this has
>>>> all been checked with partners and we are confident that all existing
>>>> implementations conform to the modified wording.
>>>
>>> cool. I like your try_unfold/fold code. it seems your code is setting/dropping
>>> CONT automatically based on ALIGHMENT, Page number etc. Alternatively,
>>> our code is always stupidly checking some conditions before setting and dropping
>>> CONT everywhere.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Particularly for the rmap issue we are discussing, our out-of-tree is
>>>>> using the entire_map for
>>>>> CONTPTE in the way I sent to you. But I guess we can learn from you to decouple
>>>>> CONTPTE from mm-core.
>>>>>
>>>>> We are doing this in mm/memory.c
>>>>>
>>>>> copy_present_cont_pte(struct vm_area_struct *dst_vma, struct
>>>>> vm_area_struct *src_vma,
>>>>> pte_t *dst_pte, pte_t *src_pte, unsigned long addr, int *rss,
>>>>> struct page **prealloc)
>>>>> {
>>>>>       struct mm_struct *src_mm = src_vma->vm_mm;
>>>>>       unsigned long vm_flags = src_vma->vm_flags;
>>>>>       pte_t pte = *src_pte;
>>>>>       struct page *page;
>>>>>
>>>>>        page = vm_normal_page(src_vma, addr, pte);
>>>>>       ...
>>>>>
>>>>>      get_page(page);
>>>>>      page_dup_rmap(page, true);   // an entire dup_rmap as you can
>>>>> see.............
>>>>>      rss[mm_counter(page)] += HPAGE_CONT_PTE_NR;
>>>>> }
>>>>>
>>>>> and we have a split in mm/cont_pte_hugepage.c to handle partially unmap,
>>>>>
>>>>> static void __split_huge_cont_pte_locked(struct vm_area_struct *vma, pte_t *pte,
>>>>> unsigned long haddr, bool freeze)
>>>>> {
>>>>> ...
>>>>>            if (compound_mapcount(head) > 1 && !TestSetPageDoubleMap(head)) {
>>>>>                   for (i = 0; i < HPAGE_CONT_PTE_NR; i++)
>>>>>                            atomic_inc(&head[i]._mapcount);
>>>>>                  atomic_long_inc(&cont_pte_double_map_count);
>>>>>            }
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>             if (atomic_add_negative(-1, compound_mapcount_ptr(head))) {
>>>>>               ...
>>>>> }
>>>>>
>>>>> I am not selling our solution any more, but just showing you some differences we
>>>>> have :-)
>>>>
>>>> OK, I understand what you were saying now. I'm currently struggling to see how
>>>> this could fit into my model. Do you have any workloads and numbers on perf
>>>> improvement of using entire_mapcount?
>>>
>>> TBH, I don't have any data on this as from the first beginning, we were using
>>> entire_map. So I have no comparison at all.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> BTW, I have concerns that a variable small-THP size will really work
>>>>>>> as userspace
>>>>>>> is probably friendly to only one fixed size. for example, userspace
>>>>>>> heap management
>>>>>>> might be optimized to a size for freeing memory to the kernel. it is
>>>>>>> very difficult
>>>>>>> for the heap to adapt to various sizes at the same time. frequent unmap/free
>>>>>>> size not equal with, and particularly smaller than small-THP size will
>>>>>>> defeat all
>>>>>>> efforts to use small-THP.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'll admit to not knowing a huge amount about user space allocators. But I will
>>>>>> say that as currently defined, the small-sized THP interface to user space
>>>>>> allows a sysadmin to specifically enable the set of sizes that they want; so a
>>>>>> single size can be enabled. I'm diliberately punting that decision away from the
>>>>>> kernel for now.
>>>>>
>>>>> Basically, userspace heap library has a PAGESIZE setting and allows users
>>>>> to allocate/free all kinds of small objects such as 16,32,64,128,256,512 etc.
>>>>> The default size is for sure equal to the basepage SIZE. once some objects are
>>>>> freed by free() and libc get a free "page", userspace heap libraries might free
>>>>> the PAGESIZE page to kernel by things like MADV_DONTNEED, then zap_pte_range().
>>>>> it is quite similar with kernel slab.
>>>>>
>>>>> so imagine we have small-THP now, but userspace libraries have *NO*
>>>>> idea at all,  so it can frequently cause unfolding.
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> FWIW, My experience with the Speedometer/JavaScript use case is that performance
>>>>>> is a little bit better when enabling 64+32+16K vs just 64K THP.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Functionally, it will not matter if the allocator is not enlightened for the THP
>>>>>> size; it can continue to free, and if a partial folio is unmapped it is put on
>>>>>> the deferred split list, then under memory pressure it is split and the unused
>>>>>> pages are reclaimed. I guess this is the bit you are concerned about having a
> 
>>>>>> performance impact?
>>>>>
>>>>> right. If this is happening on the majority of small-THP folios, we
>>>>> don't have performance
>>>>> improvement, and probably regression instead. This is really true on
>>>>> real workloads!!
>>>>>
>>>>> So that is why we really love a per-VMA hint to enable small-THP but
>>>>> obviously you
>>>>> have already supported it now by
>>>>> mm: thp: Introduce per-size thp sysfs interface
>>>>> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20231122162950.3854897-4-ryan.roberts@arm.com/
>>>>>
>>>>> we can use MADVISE rather than ALWAYS and set fixed size like 64KB, so userspace
>>>>> can set the VMA flag when it is quite sure this VMA is working with
>>>>> the alignment
>>>>> of 64KB?
>>>>
>>>> Yes, that all exists in the series today. We have also discussed the possibility
>>>> of adding a new madvise_process() call that would take the set of THP sizes that
>>>> should be considered. Then you can set different VMAs to use different sizes;
>>>> the plan was to layer that on top if/when a workload was identified. Sounds like
>>>> you might be able to help there?
>>>
>>> i'm not quite sure as on phones, we are using fixed-size CONTPTE. so we ask
>>> for either 64KB or 4KB. If we think one VMA is all good to use CONTPTE, we
>>> set a flag in this VMA and try to allocate 64KB.
>>
>> When you say "we set a flag" do you mean user space? Or is there some heuristic
>> in the kernel?
> 
> we are using a field extended by the android kernel in vma struct to
> mark this vma
> is all good to use CONTPTE. With the upstream solution you are providing, we can
> remove this dirty code[1].
> static inline bool vma_is_chp_anonymous(struct vm_area_struct *vma)
> {
>             return vma->android_kabi_reserved2 == THP_SWAP_PRIO_MAGIC;
> }

Sorry I'm not sure I've understood; how does that flag get set in the first
place? Does user space tell the kernel (via e.g. madvise()) or does the kernel
set it based on devined heuristics?

> 
> [1] https://github.com/OnePlusOSS/android_kernel_oneplus_sm8550/blob/oneplus/sm8550_u_14.0.0_oneplus11/include/linux/mm.h#L4031
> 
> Thanks
> Barry