[PATCH 3/6] mm/damon/paddr: support hugetlb folios in access monitoring

From: Krishna Iyer

Date: Sun Aug 30 2026 - 01:15:13 EST


DAMON's physical address space monitoring is blind to hugetlb-backed
memory. Every access check starts at damon_get_folio(), which rejects
folios that are not on the LRU lists. Hugetlb folios are managed
outside of the LRU by design, so every sampling attempt on
hugetlb-backed memory silently fails and the pages are reported as
never accessed.

This is a significant blind spot on virtualization hosts. Cloud
hypervisor hosts commonly back guest memory with 1 GiB hugetlbfs pages,
covering the vast majority of the machine's memory. On such hosts,
modules like DAMON_STAT observe only the host-side remainder (kernel,
page cache, daemons) and report all guest working sets as permanently
idle, defeating the purpose of host-level access monitoring. In
testing on a 1 TiB host, an hour of 4-thread random access over 842 GiB
inside a guest was statistically indistinguishable from an idle host,
while a 40x smaller host-side workload produced a quantitatively
correct response.

Add damon_get_folio_incl_hugetlb(), which additionally accepts hugetlb
folios, and use it in the two paddr access monitoring primitives,
damon_pa_mkold() and damon_pa_young(). With the previous commit
teaching the folio-granular rmap walkers to age huge PTEs and to call
the mmu notifiers spanning the whole huge page, this makes guest
accesses visible through secondary MMU (e.g. KVM/EPT) young bits.

Free hugetlb pool folios have a zero refcount, so folio_try_get()
naturally keeps rejecting them.

The DAMOS action appliers (damon_pa_pageout(),
damon_pa_mark_accessed_or_deactivate(), damon_pa_migrate(),
damon_pa_stat()) keep using damon_get_folio(): reclaim, LRU
manipulation and migration cannot act on hugetlb folios, so their
behavior is unchanged.

Note that the access check granularity for hugetlb-backed memory is the
huge page size: one touched byte reports the whole (up to 1 GiB) page
as accessed. Also, DAMON now consumes secondary MMU young bits that
KVM's own aging uses; at DAMON's sampling rate (one page per region per
sampling interval) the interference is negligible.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Krishna Iyer <kiyer@xxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/damon/ops-common.c | 31 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
mm/damon/ops-common.h | 1 +
mm/damon/paddr.c | 4 ++--
3 files changed, 30 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/damon/ops-common.c b/mm/damon/ops-common.c
index 62004206ca31..ece101d34684 100644
--- a/mm/damon/ops-common.c
+++ b/mm/damon/ops-common.c
@@ -15,14 +15,20 @@
#include "../internal.h"
#include "ops-common.h"

+static bool damon_folio_observable(struct folio *folio, bool incl_hugetlb)
+{
+ return folio_test_lru(folio) ||
+ (incl_hugetlb && folio_test_hugetlb(folio));
+}
+
/*
- * Get an online page for a pfn if it's in the LRU list. Otherwise, returns
- * NULL.
+ * Get an online page for a pfn if it's in the LRU list, or a hugetlb folio if
+ * @incl_hugetlb is set. Otherwise, returns NULL.
*
* The body of this function is stolen from the 'page_idle_get_folio()'. We
* steal rather than reuse it because the code is quite simple.
*/
-struct folio *damon_get_folio(unsigned long pfn)
+static struct folio *__damon_get_folio(unsigned long pfn, bool incl_hugetlb)
{
struct page *page = pfn_to_online_page(pfn);
struct folio *folio;
@@ -33,13 +39,30 @@ struct folio *damon_get_folio(unsigned long pfn)
folio = page_folio(page);
if (!folio_try_get(folio))
return NULL;
- if (unlikely(page_folio(page) != folio) || !folio_test_lru(folio)) {
+ if (unlikely(page_folio(page) != folio) ||
+ !damon_folio_observable(folio, incl_hugetlb)) {
folio_put(folio);
folio = NULL;
}
return folio;
}

+struct folio *damon_get_folio(unsigned long pfn)
+{
+ return __damon_get_folio(pfn, false);
+}
+
+/*
+ * Same to damon_get_folio(), but also accepts hugetlb folios, which are
+ * managed outside of the LRU lists. Aimed to be used by access monitoring
+ * primitives. DAMOS actions that assume LRU-managed folios should keep using
+ * damon_get_folio().
+ */
+struct folio *damon_get_folio_incl_hugetlb(unsigned long pfn)
+{
+ return __damon_get_folio(pfn, true);
+}
+
void damon_ptep_mkold(pte_t *pte, struct vm_area_struct *vma, unsigned long addr)
{
pte_t pteval = ptep_get(pte);
diff --git a/mm/damon/ops-common.h b/mm/damon/ops-common.h
index f7811c9c7a02..68d7de49c87a 100644
--- a/mm/damon/ops-common.h
+++ b/mm/damon/ops-common.h
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@
#include <linux/damon.h>

struct folio *damon_get_folio(unsigned long pfn);
+struct folio *damon_get_folio_incl_hugetlb(unsigned long pfn);

void damon_ptep_mkold(pte_t *pte, struct vm_area_struct *vma, unsigned long addr);
void damon_pmdp_mkold(pmd_t *pmd, struct vm_area_struct *vma, unsigned long addr);
diff --git a/mm/damon/paddr.c b/mm/damon/paddr.c
index 5c6c3a597fd0..09d418b2874b 100644
--- a/mm/damon/paddr.c
+++ b/mm/damon/paddr.c
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@ static unsigned long damon_pa_core_addr(

static void damon_pa_mkold(phys_addr_t paddr)
{
- struct folio *folio = damon_get_folio(PHYS_PFN(paddr));
+ struct folio *folio = damon_get_folio_incl_hugetlb(PHYS_PFN(paddr));

if (!folio)
return;
@@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ static void damon_pa_prepare_access_checks(struct damon_ctx *ctx)

static bool damon_pa_young(phys_addr_t paddr)
{
- struct folio *folio = damon_get_folio(PHYS_PFN(paddr));
+ struct folio *folio = damon_get_folio_incl_hugetlb(PHYS_PFN(paddr));
bool accessed;

if (!folio)
--
2.54.0