The global zero page is used to satisfy an anonymous read fault. If
THP(Transparent HugePage) is enabled then the global huge zero page is
used. The global huge zero page uses an atomic counter for reference
counting and is allocated/freed dynamically according to its counter
value.
CPU time spent on that counter will greatly increase if there are a lot
of processes doing anonymous read faults. This patch proposes a way to
reduce the access to the global counter so that the CPU load can be
reduced accordingly.
To do this, a new flag of the mm_struct is introduced:
MMF_USED_HUGE_ZERO_PAGE. With this flag, the process only need to touch
the global counter in two cases:
1 The first time it uses the global huge zero page;
2 The time when mm_user of its mm_struct reaches zero.
Note that right now, the huge zero page is eligible to be freed as soon
as its last use goes away. With this patch, the page will not be
eligible to be freed until the exit of the last process from which it
was ever used.
And with the use of mm_user, the kthread is not eligible to use huge
zero page either. Since no kthread is using huge zero page today, there
is no difference after applying this patch. But if that is not desired,
I can change it to when mm_count reaches zero.
Case used for test on Haswell EP:
usemem -n 72 --readonly -j 0x200000 100G
Which spawns 72 processes and each will mmap 100G anonymous space and
then do read only access to that space sequentially with a step of 2MB.
CPU cycles from perf report for base commit:
54.03% usemem [kernel.kallsyms] [k] get_huge_zero_page
CPU cycles from perf report for this commit:
0.11% usemem [kernel.kallsyms] [k] mm_get_huge_zero_page
Performance(throughput) of the workload for base commit: 1784430792
Performance(throughput) of the workload for this commit: 4726928591
164% increase.
Runtime of the workload for base commit: 707592 us
Runtime of the workload for this commit: 303970 us
50% drop.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/fe51a88f-446a-4622-1363-ad1282d71385@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Ebru Akagunduz <ebru.akagunduz@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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