• Peter Xu's avatar
    mm: avoid unnecessary page fault retires on shared memory types · d9272525
    Peter Xu authored
    I observed that for each of the shared file-backed page faults, we're very
    likely to retry one more time for the 1st write fault upon no page.  It's
    because we'll need to release the mmap lock for dirty rate limit purpose
    with balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() (in fault_dirty_shared_page()).
    
    Then after that throttling we return VM_FAULT_RETRY.
    
    We did that probably because VM_FAULT_RETRY is the only way we can return
    to the fault handler at that time telling it we've released the mmap lock.
    
    However that's not ideal because it's very likely the fault does not need
    to be retried at all since the pgtable was well installed before the
    throttling, so the next continuous fault (including taking mmap read lock,
    walk the pgtable, etc.) could be in most cases unnecessary.
    
    It's not only slowing down page faults for shared file-backed, but also add
    more mmap lock contention which is in most cases not needed at all.
    
    To observe this, one could try to write to some shmem page and look at
    "pgfault" value in /proc/vmstat, then we should expect 2 counts for each
    shmem write simply because we retried, and vm event "pgfault" will capture
    that.
    
    To make it more efficient, add a new VM_FAULT_COMPLETED return code just to
    show that we've completed the whole fault and released the lock.  It's also
    a hint that we should very possibly not need another fault immediately on
    this page because we've just completed it.
    
    This patch provides a ~12% perf boost on my aarch64 test VM with a simple
    program sequentially dirtying 400MB shmem file being mmap()ed and these are
    the time it needs:
    
      Before: 650.980 ms (+-1.94%)
      After:  569.396 ms (+-1.38%)
    
    I believe it could help more than that.
    
    We need some special care on GUP and the s390 pgfault handler (for gmap
    code before returning from pgfault), the rest changes in the page fault
    handlers should be relatively straightforward.
    
    Another thing to mention is that mm_account_fault() does take this new
    fault as a generic fault to be accounted, unlike VM_FAULT_RETRY.
    
    I explicitly didn't touch hmm_vma_fault() and break_ksm() because they do
    not handle VM_FAULT_RETRY even with existing code, so I'm literally keeping
    them as-is.
    
    Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220530183450.42886-1-peterx@redhat.comSigned-off-by: default avatarPeter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarGeert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarVineet Gupta <vgupta@kernel.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarGuo Ren <guoren@kernel.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarMax Filippov <jcmvbkbc@gmail.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarChristian Borntraeger <borntraeger@linux.ibm.com>
    Acked-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au> (powerpc)
    Acked-by: default avatarCatalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarAlistair Popple <apopple@nvidia.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
    Acked-by: Russell King (Oracle) <rmk+kernel@armlinux.org.uk>	[arm part]
    Acked-by: default avatarHeiko Carstens <hca@linux.ibm.com>
    Cc: Vasily Gorbik <gor@linux.ibm.com>
    Cc: Stafford Horne <shorne@gmail.com>
    Cc: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    Cc: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
    Cc: Brian Cain <bcain@quicinc.com>
    Cc: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
    Cc: Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>
    Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
    Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
    Cc: Janosch Frank <frankja@linux.ibm.com>
    Cc: Albert Ou <aou@eecs.berkeley.edu>
    Cc: Anton Ivanov <anton.ivanov@cambridgegreys.com>
    Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
    Cc: Sven Schnelle <svens@linux.ibm.com>
    Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
    Cc: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
    Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
    Cc: Alexander Gordeev <agordeev@linux.ibm.com>
    Cc: Jonas Bonn <jonas@southpole.se>
    Cc: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
    Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
    Cc: Michal Simek <monstr@monstr.eu>
    Cc: Matt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com>
    Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
    Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
    Cc: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
    Cc: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@dabbelt.com>
    Cc: Stefan Kristiansson <stefan.kristiansson@saunalahti.fi>
    Cc: Paul Walmsley <paul.walmsley@sifive.com>
    Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru>
    Cc: Chris Zankel <chris@zankel.net>
    Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: Dinh Nguyen <dinguyen@kernel.org>
    Cc: Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>
    Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
    Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
    Cc: Thomas Bogendoerfer <tsbogend@alpha.franken.de>
    Cc: Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
    Cc: Yoshinori Sato <ysato@users.osdn.me>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    d9272525
fault.c 14.5 KB