Re: [PATCH 0/8] Optimize anonymous swapbacked large folio unmapping
From: Dev Jain
Date: Sun Jul 26 2026 - 05:12:44 EST
On 23/07/26 12:38 pm, Dev Jain wrote:
> Speed up unmapping of anonymous swapbacked large folios by clearing
> the ptes, and setting swap ptes, in one go.
>
> The following benchmark (stolen from Barry) is used to measure the
> time taken to swapout 256M worth of memory backed by 64K large folios:
>
> #define _GNU_SOURCE
> #include <stdio.h>
> #include <stdlib.h>
> #include <sys/mman.h>
> #include <string.h>
> #include <time.h>
> #include <unistd.h>
> #include <errno.h>
>
> #define SIZE_MB 256
> #define SIZE_BYTES (SIZE_MB * 1024 * 1024)
>
> int main() {
> void *addr = mmap(NULL, SIZE_BYTES, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
> MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0);
> if (addr == MAP_FAILED) {
> perror("mmap failed");
> return 1;
> }
>
> memset(addr, 0, SIZE_BYTES);
>
> struct timespec start, end;
> clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &start);
>
> if (madvise(addr, SIZE_BYTES, MADV_PAGEOUT) != 0) {
> perror("madvise(MADV_PAGEOUT) failed");
> munmap(addr, SIZE_BYTES);
> return 1;
> }
>
> clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &end);
>
> long duration_ns = (end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec) * 1e9 +
> (end.tv_nsec - start.tv_nsec);
> printf("madvise(MADV_PAGEOUT) took %ld ns (%.3f ms)\n",
> duration_ns, duration_ns / 1e6);
>
> munmap(addr, SIZE_BYTES);
> return 0;
> }
>
> Performance as measured on a Linux VM on Apple M3 (arm64):
>
> Vanilla - Mean: 37401913 ns, std dev: 12%
> Patched - Mean: 17420282 ns, std dev: 11%
>
> resulting in more than 2x speedup.
>
> No regression observed on 4K folios.
>
> Performance as measured on bare metal x86:
>
> Vanilla - mean: 54986286 ns, std dev: 1.5%
> Patched - mean: 51930795 ns, std dev: 3%
>
> I tried magnifying the difference on x86 by using 1M large folios, but
> can't spot an obvious improvement (looks like my system is too fast to
> benefit from batched atomic operations!), hinting that the benefit lies
> mainly in the reduction of ptep_get() calls and the reduction of TLB
> flushes during contpte-unfolding, on arm64.
>
> No regression is observed on 4K folios on x86 too.
>
> ---
>
Sashiko:
Patch 1: at that point there is no caller passing 1 < nr_pages < folio_nr_pages to
folio_dup_swap_pages(), so doesn't apply.
Patch 3:
a) yes I can add a sanity check here, something like VM_WARN_ON_ONCE(page_anon_exclusive_batch != nr_pages).
b) There is no caller passing level == PGTABLE_LEVEL_PUD, but for future-proofing I can change this
to level != PGTABLE_LEVEL_PTE.
Patch 8:
the is_defined() thingy is wrong, I'll change that. This was pointed out before too, but in between
splitting that series into multiple sub-series, I forgot to incorporate this change, sorry.