Re: [PATCH 4.4 131/160] mm: thp: relax __GFP_THISNODE for MADV_HUGEPAGE mappings

[Michal Hocko]

On Mon 19-11-18 14:16:24, David Rientjes wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Nov 2018, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> 
> > 4.4-stable review patch.  If anyone has any objections, please let me know.
> > 
> 
> As I noted when this patch was originally proposed and when I nacked it[*] 
> because it causes a 13.9% increase in remote memory access latency and up 
> to 40% increase in remote memory allocation latency on much of our 
> software stack that uses MADV_HUGEPAGE after mremapping the text segment 
> to memory backed by hugepages, I don't think this is stable material.

There was a wider consensus that this is the most minimal fix for users
who see a regression introduced by 5265047ac301 ("mm, thp: really
limit transparent hugepage allocation to local node"). As it has been
discussed extensively there is no universal win but we should always opt
for the safer side which this patch is accomplishing. The changelog goes
in length explaining them along with numbers. I am not happy that your
particular workload is suffering but this area certainly requires much
more changes to satisfy wider range of users.

> The 4.4 kernel is almost three years old and this changes the NUMA 
> locality of any user of MADV_HUGEPAGE.

Yes and we have seen bug reports as we adopted this older kernel only
now.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs