Re: [PATCH] mm: Speed up mremap on large regions

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Tue Oct 09 2018 - 17:39:05 EST


On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 13:14:00 -0700 "Joel Fernandes (Google)" <joel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Android needs to mremap large regions of memory during memory management
> related operations. The mremap system call can be really slow if THP is
> not enabled. The bottleneck is move_page_tables, which is copying each
> pte at a time, and can be really slow across a large map. Turning on THP
> may not be a viable option, and is not for us. This patch speeds up the
> performance for non-THP system by copying at the PMD level when possible.
>
> The speed up is three orders of magnitude. On a 1GB mremap, the mremap
> completion times drops from 160-250 millesconds to 380-400 microseconds.
>
> Before:
> Total mremap time for 1GB data: 242321014 nanoseconds.
> Total mremap time for 1GB data: 196842467 nanoseconds.
> Total mremap time for 1GB data: 167051162 nanoseconds.
>
> After:
> Total mremap time for 1GB data: 385781 nanoseconds.
> Total mremap time for 1GB data: 388959 nanoseconds.
> Total mremap time for 1GB data: 402813 nanoseconds.
>
> Incase THP is enabled, the optimization is skipped. I also flush the
> tlb every time we do this optimization since I couldn't find a way to
> determine if the low-level PTEs are dirty. It is seen that the cost of
> doing so is not much compared the improvement, on both x86-64 and arm64.

Looks tasty.

> --- a/mm/mremap.c
> +++ b/mm/mremap.c
> @@ -191,6 +191,54 @@ static void move_ptes(struct vm_area_struct *vma, pmd_t *old_pmd,
> drop_rmap_locks(vma);
> }
>
> +bool move_normal_pmd(struct vm_area_struct *vma, unsigned long old_addr,

I'll park this for now, shall plan to add a `static' in there then
merge it up after 4.20-rc1.