Re: [RFC PATCH 00/37] Speculative page faults
From: Chinwen Chang
Date: Tue Apr 20 2021 - 21:44:13 EST
On Tue, 2021-04-06 at 18:44 -0700, Michel Lespinasse wrote:
> This patchset is my take on speculative page faults (spf).
> It builds on ideas that have been previously proposed by Laurent Dufour,
> Peter Zijlstra and others before. While Laurent's previous proposal
> was rejected around the time of LSF/MM 2019, I am hoping we can revisit
> this now based on what I think is a simpler and more bisectable approach,
> much improved scaling numbers in the anonymous vma case, and the Android
> use case that has since emerged. I will expand on these points towards
> the end of this message.
>
>
> Classical page fault processing takes the mmap read lock in order to
> prevent races with mmap writers. In contrast, speculative fault
> processing does not take the mmap read lock, and instead verifies,
> when the results of the page fault are about to get committed and
> become visible to other threads, that no mmap writers have been
> running concurrently with the page fault. If the check fails,
> speculative updates do not get committed and the fault is retried
> in the usual, non-speculative way (with the mmap read lock held).
>
> The concurrency check is implemented using a per-mm mmap sequence count.
> The counter is incremented at the beginning and end of each mmap write
> operation. If the counter is initially observed to have an even value,
> and has the same value later on, the observer can deduce that no mmap
> writers have been running concurrently with it between those two times.
> This is similar to a seqlock, except that readers never spin on the
> counter value (they would instead revert to taking the mmap read lock),
> and writers are allowed to sleep. One benefit of this approach is that
> it requires no writer side changes, just some hooks in the mmap write
> lock APIs that writers already use.
>
> The first step of a speculative page fault is to look up the vma and
> read its contents (currently by making a copy of the vma, though in
> principle it would be sufficient to only read the vma attributes that
> are used in page faults). The mmap sequence count is used to verify
> that there were no mmap writers concurrent to the lookup and copy steps.
> Note that walking rbtrees while there may potentially be concurrent
> writers is not an entirely new idea in linux, as latched rbtrees
> are already doing this. This is safe as long as the lookup is
> followed by a sequence check to verify that concurrency did not
> actually occur (and abort the speculative fault if it did).
>
> The next step is to walk down the existing page table tree to find the
> current pte entry. This is done with interrupts disabled to avoid
> races with munmap(). Again, not an entirely new idea, as this repeats
> a pattern already present in fast GUP. Similar precautions are also
> taken when taking the page table lock.
>
> In the case of mapped files, additional precautions must be taken when
> dereferencing vma->vm_file. The vma copy that is taken at the start of
> the speculative page fault includes a pointer to the file, but does not
> take a reference to it. The reference is held by the original vma.
> In order to guarantee the validity of the file through the vm_ops->fault()
> and/or vm_ops->map_pages() calls, these are run within an rcu read locked
> code section, with the mmap sequence count being verified at the start of
> the section and the vma file fput() is rcu-deferred when vmas are freed.
>
>
> The patch series applies on top of linux v5.12-rc5;
> a git tree is also available:
> git fetch https://github.com/lespinasse/linux.git v5.12-rc5-spf
>
>
> Commits 1 to 4 are preparatory cleanups
> (which I would like to push regardless of what happens to the rest)
>
> Commits 5 and 6 introduce CONFIG_SPECULATIVE_PAGE_FAULT and lets us
> enable it on x86 so we can test the new code as it gets introduced.
>
> Commits 7 and 8 extend handle_mm_fault() so it can be used for
> speculative faults; initially these always abort with VM_FAULT_RETRY.
>
> Commits 9 to 14 introduce all the basic building blocks for speculative
> page faults:
> - Commit 9 adds the mmap sequence count that will be used for detecting
> when writers have been running concurrently with an spf attempt
> (in which case the attempt will be aborted);
> - Commit 10 adds RCU safe vma freeing;
> - Commit 11 does a lockless VMA lookup and starts the spf handling attempt;
> - (Commit 12 is a small refactor preparing for the next commit);
> - Commit 13 walks down the existing page tables, carefully avoiding
> races with potential writers (munmap in particular)
> - Commit 14 introduces pte_map_lock() and pte_spinlock(), which attempt
> to (optionally map and) lock an existing page table when it's time to
> commit page fault results to it.
>
> Commits 15 to 22 progressively implement spf for most anon vma cases.
> This mostly comes down to using the pte_map_lock() and pte_spinlock()
> APIs where needed, and making sure to abort speculation in unsupported
> cases (mostly anon_vma allocation and userfaultfd). The work is split
> in small steps so that changes can be tested soon after they are added.
>
> Commits 23 to 26 introduce the main ideas for extending spf to file
> mapped vmas:
> - Commit 23 adds RCU safe vma->vm_file freeing;
> - Commit 24 uses RCU to ensure vma->vm_file stays valid through the
> vm_ops->fault() method call;
> - Commit 25 implements the speculative case for filemap_fault().
> This only handles the common case where the desired page is already
> cached, is not locked and where we don't need to trigger readahead.
> - Commit 26 ensures we use pte_map_lock() to commit the faulted page to the
> mm address space, verifying that no mmap writers ran during the fault.
>
> Commits 27 and 28 use the same ideas to implement speculative fault-around.
>
> Commits 29 to 32 complete spf support for most mapped file types.
> A list of supported file types is introduced, and we allow speculative
> execution through the new speculative file faulting paths for those files.
> Note that the speculative support does not extend to shared file
> mapping writes in this patchset, as this would require some support
> for vm_ops->page_mkwrite() which isn't handled yet.
>
> Commits 33 and 34 disable speculative handling for single-threaded
> userspace. This is for (minor) performance tuning and is pushed
> towards the end of the series to make it easier to exercise the spf
> paths as they are introduced.
>
> Commit 35 adds some extra statistics. Not pushing for inclusion on
> these but I thought it might come handy when discussing spf performance.
>
> Commits 36 and 37 add spf support on the arm64 architecture. It should
> be easy to add other architectures too, given access to test machines.
>
>
> As Laurent's previous proposal before LSF/MM 2019 was rejected for
> complexity reasons, I am hoping that some of the changes I made will
> help address these concerns:
>
> - First, the patchset is structured to be bisectable. Every few commits
> the new code gets enabled, which makes for easier testing and also,
> I think, should make it easier for reviewers to understand how the
> various commits relate to each other.
>
> - This patchset requires no changes to mmap writers other than instrumenting
> the mmap write lock APIs.
>
> - The fault handler operates on a stable copy of the vma, so it does not
> require any special care to avoid the possibility of vma fields being
> modified concurrently with it.
>
>
> mmtest results on HP Z840 workstation
> (2 socket Xeon E5-2690 v3 @ 2.60GHz, 24 cores / 48 threads total):
> See https://www.lespinasse.org/kernel/v5.12-rc5-spf/mmtests/
>
> Highlights from the above:
>
> - pft results show some pretty damn good scalability. Throughput using
> all 48 threads (24 cores) is 24x that of single-threaded tests, and
> 3.7x higher than when using the baseline kernel. This is the result
> of avoiding writing into any shared cache lines, be it for mmap lock
> or vma refcounting, during speculative page faults.
> (Experiments show that adding a single atomic variable per vma,
> which would be incremented and decremented before and after spf
> copies the vma, would decrease the 48-threads throughput by 62%).
>
> - wis-pf page_fault1 (anon THP) shows some moderate improvement.
>
> - wis-pf page_fault2 (private file mapping write) shows some
> improvement, though much less than in the pft (anon) case.
> The performance is limited by LRU contention here.
>
> - wis-pf page_fault3 (shared file mapping write) gets a bit slower.
> This patchset does not implement speculative handling for this case.
>
> - wis-mmap likes the change, even though it doesn't do much page faults.
> This seems to be a side effect of rcu safe vma freeing reducing vma
> reuse between threads running on separate CPUs.
>
> - wis-malloc benefits from a mix of the anon vma and rcu effects.
>
> - macro benchmarks are mostly performance neutral, with some small
> benefit in limited cases.
>
>
> Another potential motivation for this is the Android use case.
> Several Android vendors have picked up the previous SPF proposal and
> included it on their devices because it reduces application start-up
> times, which is an important performance metric for them.
>
> Early Android test results with this patchset (actually a backport of
> it to the Android 5.10 kernel) show that it is also effective in
> reducing application start times, similar to what the prior SPF
> proposal did. I do not have a direct comparison available though,
> as our port of Laurent's prior SPF series to the 5.10 android kernel
> is showing some instabilities. SPF abort rates are in the low single
> digit percentage range, and few of these aborts are caused by the fact
> that we only use a global counter to detect fault vs writer concurrency.
> We are seeing launch time improvements for a variety of Android packages
> that use a large number of threads during startup:
> Meituan: 15%
> Iqiyi: 8%
> Tiktok: 4%
> YouTube: 3%
> I expect Suren may have more Android numbers from partners in a few days.
>
Thanks for the effort:)
We have tried to merge this SPF series to our code base, and measured
the difference of application launch time. As you mentioned, it has
great improvements, especially for those high TLP ones.
Here is a brief report of our experiment, FYR.
(The launch time is in ms)
app version-code w/o SPF w/ SPF improve(%)
------------------------------------------------------------------
Meituan 900140601 2427 1655 31.81
Taobao 241 1200 1170 2.5
WeChat 1360 941 922 2.02
Line 16071401 686 665 3.06
> ChromeOS measurements with the previous SPF patchset also showed
> significant reduction in page fault, mmap and munmap times. We do not
> have data on this new SPF proposal yet, though.
>
>
> I would like any feedback on the patchset, and most particularly about:
> - Has the complexity issue in previous SPF proposals been sufficiently
> addressed ?
> - Are the performance benefits compelling enough ? I think the answer is
> yes for the anon case, but maybe not as clear for the file cases.
> - Is the Android use case compelling enough to merge the entire patchset ?
> - Can we use this as a foundation for other mmap scalability work ?
> I hear several proposals involving the idea of RCU based fault handling,
> and hope this proposal might serve as a building block for these ?
>
>
> Michel Lespinasse (37):
> mmap locking API: mmap_lock_is_contended returns a bool
> mmap locking API: name the return values
> do_anonymous_page: use update_mmu_tlb()
> do_anonymous_page: reduce code duplication
> mm: introduce CONFIG_SPECULATIVE_PAGE_FAULT
> x86/mm: define ARCH_SUPPORTS_SPECULATIVE_PAGE_FAULT
> mm: add FAULT_FLAG_SPECULATIVE flag
> mm: add do_handle_mm_fault()
> mm: add per-mm mmap sequence counter for speculative page fault handling.
> mm: rcu safe vma freeing
> x86/mm: attempt speculative mm faults first
> mm: refactor __handle_mm_fault() / handle_pte_fault()
> mm: implement speculative handling in __handle_mm_fault().
> mm: add pte_map_lock() and pte_spinlock()
> mm: implement speculative handling in do_anonymous_page()
> mm: enable speculative fault handling through do_anonymous_page()
> mm: implement speculative handling in do_numa_page()
> mm: enable speculative fault handling in do_numa_page()
> mm: implement speculative handling in wp_page_copy()
> mm: implement and enable speculative fault handling in handle_pte_fault()
> mm: implement speculative handling in do_swap_page()
> mm: enable speculative fault handling through do_swap_page()
> mm: rcu safe vma->vm_file freeing
> mm: implement speculative handling in __do_fault()
> mm: implement speculative handling in filemap_fault()
> mm: implement speculative fault handling in finish_fault()
> mm: implement speculative handling in do_fault_around()
> mm: implement speculative handling in filemap_map_pages()
> fs: list file types that support speculative faults.
> mm: enable speculative fault handling for supported file types.
> ext4: implement speculative fault handling
> f2fs: implement speculative fault handling
> mm: enable speculative fault handling only for multithreaded user space
> mm: rcu safe vma freeing only for multithreaded user space
> mm: spf statistics
> arm64/mm: define ARCH_SUPPORTS_SPECULATIVE_PAGE_FAULT
> arm64/mm: attempt speculative mm faults first
>
> arch/arm64/Kconfig | 1 +
> arch/arm64/mm/fault.c | 52 +++
> arch/x86/Kconfig | 1 +
> arch/x86/mm/fault.c | 51 +++
> fs/btrfs/file.c | 1 +
> fs/cifs/file.c | 1 +
> fs/exec.c | 1 +
> fs/ext4/file.c | 1 +
> fs/ext4/inode.c | 7 +-
> fs/f2fs/file.c | 8 +-
> fs/fuse/file.c | 1 +
> fs/nfs/file.c | 1 +
> fs/ubifs/file.c | 1 +
> fs/vboxsf/file.c | 1 +
> fs/xfs/xfs_file.c | 3 +
> include/linux/mm.h | 76 +++-
> include/linux/mm_types.h | 20 +-
> include/linux/mmap_lock.h | 109 ++++--
> include/linux/vm_event_item.h | 28 ++
> include/linux/vmstat.h | 6 +
> kernel/fork.c | 26 +-
> mm/Kconfig | 22 ++
> mm/Kconfig.debug | 7 +
> mm/filemap.c | 73 +++-
> mm/memory.c | 634 ++++++++++++++++++++++++----------
> mm/mmap.c | 11 +-
> mm/nommu.c | 6 +-
> mm/vmstat.c | 28 ++
> 28 files changed, 942 insertions(+), 235 deletions(-)