Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm/page_ref: add tracepoint to track down page reference manipulation

[Minchan Kim]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 04:34:30PM +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> On 11/09/2015 08:23 AM, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> > CMA allocation should be guaranteed to succeed by definition, but,
> > unfortunately, it would be failed sometimes. It is hard to track down
> > the problem, because it is related to page reference manipulation and
> > we don't have any facility to analyze it.
> 
> Reminds me of the PeterZ's VM_PINNED patchset. What happened to it?
> https://lwn.net/Articles/600502/
> 
> > This patch adds tracepoints to track down page reference manipulation.
> > With it, we can find exact reason of failure and can fix the problem.
> > Following is an example of tracepoint output.
> > 
> > <...>-9018  [004]    92.678375: page_ref_set:         pfn=0x17ac9 flags=0x0 count=1 mapcount=0 mapping=(nil) mt=4 val=1
> > <...>-9018  [004]    92.678378: kernel_stack:
> >  => get_page_from_freelist (ffffffff81176659)
> >  => __alloc_pages_nodemask (ffffffff81176d22)
> >  => alloc_pages_vma (ffffffff811bf675)
> >  => handle_mm_fault (ffffffff8119e693)
> >  => __do_page_fault (ffffffff810631ea)
> >  => trace_do_page_fault (ffffffff81063543)
> >  => do_async_page_fault (ffffffff8105c40a)
> >  => async_page_fault (ffffffff817581d8)
> > [snip]
> > <...>-9018  [004]    92.678379: page_ref_mod:         pfn=0x17ac9 flags=0x40048 count=2 mapcount=1 mapping=0xffff880015a78dc1 mt=4 val=1
> > [snip]
> > ...
> > ...
> > <...>-9131  [001]    93.174468: test_pages_isolated:  start_pfn=0x17800 end_pfn=0x17c00 fin_pfn=0x17ac9 ret=fail
> > [snip]
> > <...>-9018  [004]    93.174843: page_ref_mod_and_test: pfn=0x17ac9 flags=0x40068 count=0 mapcount=0 mapping=0xffff880015a78dc1 mt=4 val=-1 ret=1
> >  => release_pages (ffffffff8117c9e4)
> >  => free_pages_and_swap_cache (ffffffff811b0697)
> >  => tlb_flush_mmu_free (ffffffff81199616)
> >  => tlb_finish_mmu (ffffffff8119a62c)
> >  => exit_mmap (ffffffff811a53f7)
> >  => mmput (ffffffff81073f47)
> >  => do_exit (ffffffff810794e9)
> >  => do_group_exit (ffffffff81079def)
> >  => SyS_exit_group (ffffffff81079e74)
> >  => entry_SYSCALL_64_fastpath (ffffffff817560b6)
> > 
> > This output shows that problem comes from exit path. In exit path,
> > to improve performance, pages are not freed immediately. They are gathered
> > and processed by batch. During this process, migration cannot be possible
> > and CMA allocation is failed. This problem is hard to find without this
> > page reference tracepoint facility.
> 
> Yeah but when you realized it was this problem, what was the fix? Probably not
> remove batching from exit path? Shouldn't CMA in this case just try waiting for
> the pins to go away, which would eventually happen? And for long-term pins,
> VM_PINNED would make sure the pages are migrated away from CMA pageblocks first?
> 
> So I'm worried that this is quite nontrivial change for a very specific usecase.

This patch is not to solve the problem but just to expose what is culprit.

For using VM_PINNED, firstly, we should know where are long-term pins.
There are obviously clear places which will be first target if we use
VM_PINNED but somewhere are vague. For vague places, this patch will
help finding there. Even we don't use VM_PINNED, this patch will expose
current obstacle which can help to understand current problems.
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