Re: [PATCH v6 4/5] arm64: mm: implement the architecture-specific clear_flush_young_ptes()

Baolin Wang
2026-03-07T02:14:50Z

On 3/7/26 5:20 AM, Barry Song wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2026 at 10:07 PM Baolin Wang
> <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com> wrote:
>>
>> Implement the Arm64 architecture-specific clear_flush_young_ptes() to enable
>> batched checking of young flags and TLB flushing, improving performance during
>> large folio reclamation.
>>
>> Performance testing:
>> Allocate 10G clean file-backed folios by mmap() in a memory cgroup, and try to
>> reclaim 8G file-backed folios via the memory.reclaim interface. I can observe
>> 33% performance improvement on my Arm64 32-core server (and 10%+ improvement
>> on my X86 machine). Meanwhile, the hotspot folio_check_references() dropped
>> from approximately 35% to around 5%.
>>
>> W/o patchset:
>> real 0m1.518s
>> user 0m0.000s
>> sys 0m1.518s
>>
>> W/ patchset:
>> real 0m1.018s
>> user 0m0.000s
>> sys 0m1.018s
>>
>> Reviewed-by: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com>
>> Signed-off-by: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com>
>
> Reviewed-by: Barry Song <baohua@kernel.org>

Thanks Barry. But this series has been upstreamed, I can not add your
reviewed tag.

>
>> ---
>> arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h | 11 +++++++++++
>> 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+)
>>
>> diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
>> index 3dabf5ea17fa..a17eb8a76788 100644
>> --- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
>> +++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
>> @@ -1838,6 +1838,17 @@ static inline int ptep_clear_flush_young(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
>> return contpte_clear_flush_young_ptes(vma, addr, ptep, 1);
>> }
>>
>> +#define clear_flush_young_ptes clear_flush_young_ptes
>> +static inline int clear_flush_young_ptes(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
>> + unsigned long addr, pte_t *ptep,
>> + unsigned int nr)
>> +{
>> + if (likely(nr == 1 && !pte_cont(__ptep_get(ptep))))
>> + return __ptep_clear_flush_young(vma, addr, ptep);
>> +
>> + return contpte_clear_flush_young_ptes(vma, addr, ptep, nr);
>> +}
>
> A similar question arises here:
>
> If nr = 4 for 16KB large folios and one of those entries is young,
> we end up flushing the TLB for all 4 PTEs.
>
> If all four entries are young, we win; if only one is young, it seems
> we flush 3 redundant pages. but arm64 has TLB coalescing, so
> maybe they are just one TLB?

We discussed a similar issue in the previous thread [1], and I quote
some comments from Ryan:

"
My concern was the opportunity cost of evicting the entries for all the
non-accessed parts of the folio from the TLB. But of course, I'm talking
nonsense because the architecture does not allow caching non-accessed
entries in the TLB.
"

[1]