Re: [mm] 4e2c82a409: ltp.overcommit_memory01.fail

[Michal Hocko]

On Sun 05-07-20 11:52:32, Qian Cai wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 05, 2020 at 08:58:54PM +0800, Feng Tang wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 05, 2020 at 08:15:03AM -0400, Qian Cai wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > > On Jul 5, 2020, at 12:45 AM, Feng Tang <feng.tang@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > I did reproduce the problem, and from the debugging, this should
> > > > be the same root cause as lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200526181459.GD991@xxxxxx/
> > > > that loosing the batch cause some accuracy problem, and the solution of
> > > > adding some sync is still needed, which is dicussed in
> > > 
> > > Well, before taking any of those patches now to fix the regression,
> > > we will need some performance data first. If it turned out the
> > > original performance gain is no longer relevant anymore due to this
> > > regression fix on top, it is best to drop this patchset and restore
> > > that VM_WARN_ONCE, so you can retry later once you found a better
> > > way to optimize.
> > 
> > The fix of adding sync only happens when the memory policy is being
> > changed to OVERCOMMIT_NEVER, which is not a frequent operation in
> > normal cases.
> > 
> > For the performance improvment data both in commit log and 0day report
> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200622132548.GS5535@shao2-debian/
> > it is for the will-it-scale's mmap testcase, which will not runtime
> > change memory overcommit policy, so the data should be still valid
> > with this fix.
> 
> Well, I would expect people are perfectly reasonable to use
> OVERCOMMIT_NEVER for some workloads making it more frequent operations.

Would you have any examples? Because I find this highly unlikely.
OVERCOMMIT_NEVER only works when virtual memory is not largerly
overcommited wrt to real memory demand. And that tends to be more of
an exception rather than a rule. "Modern" userspace (whatever that
means) tends to be really hungry with virtual memory which is only used
very sparsely.

I would argue that either somebody is running an "OVERCOMMIT_NEVER"
friendly SW and this is a permanent setting or this is not used at all.
At least this is my experience.

So I strongly suspect that LTP test failure is not something we should
really lose sleep over. It would be nice to find a way to flush existing
batches but I would rather see a real workload that would suffer from
this imprecision.

On the other hand perf. boost with larger batches with defualt overcommit
setting sounds like a nice improvement to have.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs