Re: [RFC PATCH 00/16] 1GB THP support on x86_64

[Zi Yan]

On 8 Sep 2020, at 10:27, Matthew Wilcox wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 08, 2020 at 10:05:11AM -0400, Zi Yan wrote:
>> On 8 Sep 2020, at 7:57, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>> I have concerns if we would silently use 1~GB THPs in most scenarios
>>> where be would have used 2~MB THP. I'd appreciate a trigger to
>>> explicitly enable that - MADV_HUGEPAGE is not sufficient because some
>>> applications relying on that assume that the THP size will be 2~MB
>>> (especially, if you want sparse, large VMAs).
>>
>> This patchset is not intended to silently use 1GB THP in place of 2MB THP.
>> First of all, there is a knob /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enable_1GB
>> to enable 1GB THP explicitly. Also, 1GB THP is allocated from a reserved CMA
>> region (although I had alloc_contig_pages as a fallback, which can be removed
>> in next version), so users need to add hugepage_cma=nG kernel parameter to
>> enable 1GB THP allocation. If a finer control is necessary, we can add
>> a new MADV_HUGEPAGE_1GB for 1GB THP.
>
> I think we do need that flag.  Machines don't run a single workload
> (arguably with VMs, we're getting closer to going back to the single
> workload per machine, but that's a different matter).  So if there's
> one app that wants 2MB pages and one that wants 1GB pages, we need to
> be able to distinguish them.
>
> I could also see there being an app which benefits from 1GB for
> one mapping and prefers 2GB for a different mapping, so I think the
> per-mapping madvise flag is best.
>
> I'm a little wary of encoding the size of an x86 PUD in the Linux API
> though.  Probably best to follow the example set in
> include/uapi/asm-generic/hugetlb_encode.h, but I don't love it.  I
> don't have a better suggestion though.

Using hugeltb_encode.h makes sense to me. I will add it in the next version.

Thanks for the suggestion.


—
Best Regards,
Yan Zi

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature