Re: [v3 PATCH 2/2] mm: thp: fix false negative of shmem vma's THP eligibility

From: Vlastimil Babka
Date: Thu Jul 18 2019 - 17:52:10 EST


On 7/18/19 11:44 PM, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jun 2019 09:28:42 -0700 Yang Shi <yang.shi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>> Sorry for replying rather late, and not in the v2 thread, but unlike
>>> Hugh I'm not convinced that we should include vma size/alignment in the
>>> test for reporting THPeligible, which was supposed to reflect
>>> administrative settings and madvise hints. I guess it's mostly a matter
>>> of personal feeling. But one objective distinction is that the admin
>>> settings and madvise do have an exact binary result for the whole VMA,
>>> while this check is more fuzzy - only part of the VMA's span might be
>>> properly sized+aligned, and THPeligible will be 1 for the whole VMA.
>>
>> I think THPeligible is used to tell us if the vma is suitable for
>> allocating THP. Both anonymous and shmem THP checks vma size/alignment
>> to decide to or not to allocate THP.
>>
>> And, if vma size/alignment is not checked, THPeligible may show "true"
>> for even 4K mapping. This doesn't make too much sense either.
>
> This discussion seems rather inconclusive. I'll merge up the patchset
> anyway. Vlastimil, if you think some changes are needed here then
> please let's get them sorted out over the next few weeks?

Well, Hugh did ack it, albeit without commenting on this part. I don't
feel strongly enough about this for a nack.