Re: [PATCH V4 01/15] mm, THP: don't hold mmap_sem in khugepaged when allocating THP

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Fri Jul 25 2014 - 08:18:31 EST


On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 03:48:09PM +0200, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> When allocating huge page for collapsing, khugepaged currently holds mmap_sem
> for reading on the mm where collapsing occurs. Afterwards the read lock is
> dropped before write lock is taken on the same mmap_sem.
>
> Holding mmap_sem during whole huge page allocation is therefore useless, the
> vma needs to be rechecked after taking the write lock anyway. Furthemore, huge
> page allocation might involve a rather long sync compaction, and thus block
> any mmap_sem writers and i.e. affect workloads that perform frequent m(un)map
> or mprotect oterations.
>
> This patch simply releases the read lock before allocating a huge page. It
> also deletes an outdated comment that assumed vma must be stable, as it was
> using alloc_hugepage_vma(). This is no longer true since commit 9f1b868a13
> ("mm: thp: khugepaged: add policy for finding target node").
>
> Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>

--
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
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