Re: missing madvise functionality

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Nick Piggin wrote:
> Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> 
>> People might remember the thread about mysql not scaling and pointing
>> the finger quite happily at glibc.  Well, the situation is not like that.
>>
>> The problem is glibc has to work around kernel limitations.  If the
>> malloc implementation detects that a large chunk of previously allocated
>> memory is now free and unused it wants to return the memory to the
>> system.  What we currently have to do is this:
>>
>>   to free:      mmap(PROT_NONE) over the area
>>   to reuse:     mprotect(PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE)
>>
>> Yep, that's expensive, both operations need to get locks preventing
>> other threads from doing the same.
>>
>> Some people were quick to suggest that we simply avoid the freeing in
>> many situations (that's what the patch submitted by Yanmin Zhang
>> basically does).  That's no solution.  One of the very good properties
>> of the current allocator is that it does not use much memory.
> 
> 
> Does mmap(PROT_NONE) actually free the memory?
> 
> 
>> A solution for this problem is a madvise() operation with the following
>> property:
>>
>>   - the content of the address range can be discarded
>>
>>   - if an access to a page in the range happens in the future it must
>>     succeed.  The old page content can be provided or a new, empty page
>>     can be provided
>>
>> That's it.  The current MADV_DONTNEED doesn't cut it because it zaps the
>> pages, causing *all* future reuses to create page faults.  This is what
>> I guess happens in the mysql test case where the pages where unused and
>> freed but then almost immediately reused.  The page faults erased all
>> the benefits of using one mprotect() call vs a pair of mmap()/mprotect()
>> calls.
> 
> 
> Two questions.
> 
> In the case of pages being unused then almost immediately reused, why is
> it a bad solution to avoid freeing? Is it that you want to avoid
> heuristics because in some cases they could fail and end up using memory?
> 
> Secondly, why is MADV_DONTNEED bad? How much more expensive is a pagefault
> than a syscall? (including the cost of the TLB fill for the memory access
> after the syscall, of course).
> 
> zapping the pages puts them on a nice LIFO cache hot list of pages that
> can be quickly used when the next fault comes in, or used for any other
> allocation in the kernel. Putting them on some sort of reclaim list seems
> a bit pointless.
> 
> Oh, also: something like this patch would help out MADV_DONTNEED, as it
> means it can run concurrently with page faults. I think the locking will
> work (but needs forward porting).

BTW. and this way it becomes much more attractive than using mmap/mprotect
can ever be, because they must take mmap_sem for writing always.

You don't actually need to protect the ranges unless running with use after
free debugging turned on, do you?

-- 
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

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