Re: [RFC PATCH 11/14] mm/slub: allocate slabs from virtual memory

[Matteo Rizzo]

On Fri, 15 Sept 2023 at 23:57, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I assume that the TLB flushes in the queue are going to be pretty sparse
> on average.
>
> At least on x86, flush_tlb_kernel_range() falls back pretty quickly from
> individual address invalidation to just doing a full flush.  It might
> not even be worth tracking the address ranges, and just do a full flush
> every time.
>
> I'd be really curious to see how often actual ranged flushes are
> triggered from this code.  I expect it would be very near zero.

I did some quick testing with kernel compilation. On x86
flush_tlb_kernel_range does a full flush when end - start is more than 33
pages and a ranged flush otherwise. I counted how many of each we are
triggering from the TLB flush worker with some code like this:

if (addr_start < addr_end) {
if ((addr_end - addr_start) <= (33 << PAGE_SHIFT))
partial_flush_count++;
else
full_flush_count++;
}

Result after one run of kernbench:

# cat /proc/slab_tlbinfo
partial 88890 full 45223

So it seems that most flushes are ranged (at least for this workload).

-- Matteo