[PATCH v3 3/3] mm/khugepaged: release contended mmap read lock after scanning enough VMAs

From: Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM)

Date: Tue Nov 10 2026 - 12:27:52 EST


khugepaged walks an mm's VMAs under the mmap read lock in
collapse_scan_mm_slot(), checking for ineligible VMAs first, and skipping
them if encountered.

It charges cc->progress 1 page against the /sys/.../pages_to_scan budget
when these are encountered, however only checking this budget once an
eligible PMD-spanning VMA is encountered.

It can therefore hold the mmap read lock for a long time if there are a
large number of ineligible VMAs present in an mm, over which time no mmap
write locks (and thus no VMA write locks) can be acquired.

Address this by checking whether the mmap lock is contended after 1-10
ms (depending on CONFIG_HZ), i.e. the granularity of jiffies. This is a
long time for a lock to be held, so is a reasonable compromise for
determining when best to do this.

Skipping an ineligible VMA costs ~100 ns on tested hardware (x86 server),
so a batch of 1024 bounds the lock hold to ~100 us without expensive
high-grained timer checks.

This scales for large numbers of VMAs, and tests with ~1M ineligible VMAs
reduced the maximum mmap read lock hold time from ~93ms to ~110us.

This was also observed to reduce mmap_lock stalls in concurrent threads of
a similar duration. Note that a reader re-acquiring the lock can currently
steal it from a writer that is queued but not yet running, so the full
benefit to writers depends on the linked rwsem change.

Local measurements indicated no change for ordinary use cases, so this is
all upside.

This work came out of investigations into mmap stalls when getting latency
numbers for an unrelated patch series.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20261105-rwsem-dont-steal-from-queued-writer-v1-1-275e070f426f@xxxxxxxxxx/
Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) <ljs@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/khugepaged.c | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/khugepaged.c b/mm/khugepaged.c
index 7d1414a9b2a5..59bbef61f104 100644
--- a/mm/khugepaged.c
+++ b/mm/khugepaged.c
@@ -66,6 +66,13 @@ static DEFINE_READ_MOSTLY_HASHTABLE(mm_slots_hash, MM_SLOTS_HASH_BITS);

static struct kmem_cache *mm_slot_cache __ro_after_init;

+/*
+ * The number of VMAs to walk before checking for, and relieving, mmap lock
+ * contention. This bounds the maximum mmap read lock to an estimated ~100 -
+ * 300us depending on hardware.
+ */
+#define KHUGEPAGED_MAX_VMA_SCAN_BATCH 1024
+
/**
* struct khugepaged_mm_slot - khugepaged information per mm that is being scanned
* @slot: hash lookup from mm to mm_slot
@@ -2910,6 +2917,7 @@ static void collapse_scan_mm_slot(unsigned int progress_max,
struct mm_struct *mm;
struct vm_area_struct *vma;
unsigned int progress_prev = cc->progress;
+ unsigned int nr_vmas_batch = 0;

lockdep_assert_held(&khugepaged_mm_lock);
*result = SCAN_FAIL;
@@ -2942,6 +2950,18 @@ static void collapse_scan_mm_slot(unsigned int progress_max,
for_each_vma(vmi, vma) {
unsigned long hstart, hend;

+ /* Relieve mmap lock contention after walking a batch of VMAs. */
+ if (nr_vmas_batch++ >= KHUGEPAGED_MAX_VMA_SCAN_BATCH) {
+ nr_vmas_batch = 0;
+ if (mmap_lock_is_contended(mm)) {
+ mmap_read_unlock(mm);
+ cond_resched();
+ mmap_read_lock(mm);
+ vma_iter_set(&vmi, mm_slot->address);
+ continue;
+ }
+ }
+
cond_resched();
if (unlikely(collapse_test_exit_or_disable(mm))) {
cc->progress++;

--
2.56.0