Re: [PATCH hotfix 6.12] mm, mmap: limit THP aligment of anonymous mappings to PMD-aligned sizes

[Yang Shi <yang@os.amperecomputing.com>]

On 10/24/24 8:12 AM, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> Since commit efa7df3e3bb5 ("mm: align larger anonymous mappings on THP
> boundaries") a mmap() of anonymous memory without a specific address
> hint and of at least PMD_SIZE will be aligned to PMD so that it can
> benefit from a THP backing page.
>
> However this change has been shown to regress some workloads
> significantly. [1] reports regressions in various spec benchmarks, with
> up to 600% slowdown of the cactusBSSN benchmark on some platforms. The
> benchmark seems to create many mappings of 4632kB, which would have
> merged to a large THP-backed area before commit efa7df3e3bb5 and now
> they are fragmented to multiple areas each aligned to PMD boundary with
> gaps between. The regression then seems to be caused mainly due to the
> benchmark's memory access pattern suffering from TLB or cache aliasing
> due to the aligned boundaries of the individual areas.
>
> Another known regression bisected to commit efa7df3e3bb5 is darktable
> [2] [3] and early testing suggests this patch fixes the regression there
> as well.
>
> To fix the regression but still try to benefit from THP-friendly
> anonymous mapping alignment, add a condition that the size of the
> mapping must be a multiple of PMD size instead of at least PMD size. In
> case of many odd-sized mapping like the cactusBSSN creates, those will
> stop being aligned and with gaps between, and instead naturally merge
> again.

Thanks for debugging this. The fix makes sense to me. Reviewed-by: Yang 
Shi <yang@os.amperecomputing.com>

>
> Reported-by: Michael Matz <matz@suse.de>
> Debugged-by: Gabriel Krisman Bertazi <gabriel@krisman.be>
> Closes: https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1229012 [1]
> Reported-by: Matthias Bodenbinder <matthias@bodenbinder.de>
> Closes: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219366 [2]
> Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/all/2050f0d4-57b0-481d-bab8-05e8d48fed0c@leemhuis.info/ [3]
> Fixes: efa7df3e3bb5 ("mm: align larger anonymous mappings on THP boundaries")
> Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
> Cc: Yang Shi <yang@os.amperecomputing.com>
> Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
> ---
>   mm/mmap.c | 3 ++-
>   1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/mm/mmap.c b/mm/mmap.c
> index 9c0fb43064b5..a5297cfb1dfc 100644
> --- a/mm/mmap.c
> +++ b/mm/mmap.c
> @@ -900,7 +900,8 @@ __get_unmapped_area(struct file *file, unsigned long addr, unsigned long len,
>   
>   	if (get_area) {
>   		addr = get_area(file, addr, len, pgoff, flags);
> -	} else if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE)) {
> +	} else if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE)
> +		   && IS_ALIGNED(len, PMD_SIZE)) {
>   		/* Ensures that larger anonymous mappings are THP aligned. */
>   		addr = thp_get_unmapped_area_vmflags(file, addr, len,
>   						     pgoff, flags, vm_flags);