Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] add mTHP support for anonymous share pages

[David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>]

On 23.04.24 12:41, Ryan Roberts wrote:
> On 22/04/2024 08:02, Baolin Wang wrote:
>> Anonymous pages have already been supported for multi-size (mTHP) allocation
>> through commit 19eaf44954df, that can allow THP to be configured through the
>> sysfs interface located at '/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hugepage-XXkb/enabled'.
>>
>> However, the anonymous shared pages will ignore the anonymous mTHP rule
>> configured through the sysfs interface, and can only use the PMD-mapped
>> THP, that is not reasonable. Many implement anonymous page sharing through
>> mmap(MAP_SHARED | MAP_ANONYMOUS), especially in database usage scenarios,
>> therefore, users expect to apply an unified mTHP strategy for anonymous pages,
>> also including the anonymous shared pages, in order to enjoy the benefits of
>> mTHP. For example, lower latency than PMD-mapped THP, smaller memory bloat
>> than PMD-mapped THP, contiguous PTEs on ARM architecture to reduce TLB miss etc.
> 
> This sounds like a very useful addition!
> 
> Out of interest, can you point me at any workloads (and off-the-shelf benchmarks
> for those workloads) that predominantly use shared anon memory?
> 
>>
>> The primary strategy is that, the use of huge pages for anonymous shared pages
>> still follows the global control determined by the mount option "huge=" parameter
>> or the sysfs interface at '/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/shmem_enabled'.
>> The utilization of mTHP is allowed only when the global 'huge' switch is enabled.
>> Subsequently, the mTHP sysfs interface (/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hugepage-XXkb/enabled)
>> is checked to determine the mTHP size that can be used for large folio allocation
>> for these anonymous shared pages.
> 
> I'm not sure about this proposed control mechanism; won't it break
> compatibility? I could be wrong, but I don't think shmem's use of THP used to
> depend upon the value of /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled? So it
> doesn't make sense to me that we now depend upon the
> /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hugepage-XXkb/enabled values (which by
> default disables all sizes except 2M, which is set to "inherit" from
> /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled).
> 
> The other problem is that shmem_enabled has a different set of options
> (always/never/within_size/advise/deny/force) to enabled (always/madvise/never)
> 
> Perhaps it would be cleaner to do the same trick we did for enabled; Introduce
> /mm/transparent_hugepage/hugepage-XXkb/shmem_enabled, which can have all the
> same values as the top-level /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/shmem_enabled,
> plus the additional "inherit" option. By default all sizes will be set to
> "never" except 2M, which is set to "inherit".

Matches what I had in mind.

-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb