• Baolin Wang's avatar
    mm: migrate: try again if THP split is failed due to page refcnt · fd4a7ac3
    Baolin Wang authored
    When creating a virtual machine, we will use memfd_create() to get a file
    descriptor which can be used to create share memory mappings using the
    mmap function, meanwhile the mmap() will set the MAP_POPULATE flag to
    allocate physical pages for the virtual machine.
    
    When allocating physical pages for the guest, the host can fallback to
    allocate some CMA pages for the guest when over half of the zone's free
    memory is in the CMA area.
    
    In guest os, when the application wants to do some data transaction with
    DMA, our QEMU will call VFIO_IOMMU_MAP_DMA ioctl to do longterm-pin and
    create IOMMU mappings for the DMA pages.  However, when calling
    VFIO_IOMMU_MAP_DMA ioctl to pin the physical pages, we found it will be
    failed to longterm-pin sometimes.
    
    After some invetigation, we found the pages used to do DMA mapping can
    contain some CMA pages, and these CMA pages will cause a possible failure
    of the longterm-pin, due to failed to migrate the CMA pages.  The reason
    of migration failure may be temporary reference count or memory allocation
    failure.  So that will cause the VFIO_IOMMU_MAP_DMA ioctl returns error,
    which makes the application failed to start.
    
    I observed one migration failure case (which is not easy to reproduce) is
    that, the 'thp_migration_fail' count is 1 and the 'thp_split_page_failed'
    count is also 1.
    
    That means when migrating a THP which is in CMA area, but can not allocate
    a new THP due to memory fragmentation, so it will split the THP.  However
    THP split is also failed, probably the reason is temporary reference count
    of this THP.  And the temporary reference count can be caused by dropping
    page caches (I observed the drop caches operation in the system), but we
    can not drop the shmem page caches due to they are already dirty at that
    time.
    
    Especially for THP split failure, which is caused by temporary reference
    count, we can try again to mitigate the failure of migration in this case
    according to previous discussion [1].
    
    [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/470dc638-a300-f261-94b4-e27250e42f96@redhat.com/
    Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/6784730480a1df82e8f4cba1ed088e4ac767994b.1666599848.git.baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.comSigned-off-by: default avatarBaolin Wang <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatar"Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
    Cc: Alistair Popple <apopple@nvidia.com>
    Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
    Cc: Yang Shi <shy828301@gmail.com>
    Cc: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    fd4a7ac3
huge_memory.c 87.8 KB