When a page is freed back to the global pool, its buddy will be checked
to see if it's possible to do a merge. This requires accessing buddy's
page structure and that access could take a long time if it's cache
cold.
This patch adds a prefetch to the to-be-freed page's buddy outside of
zone->lock in hope of accessing buddy's page structure later under
zone->lock will be faster. Since we *always* do buddy merging and check
an order-0 page's buddy to try to merge it when it goes into the main
allocator, the cacheline will always come in, i.e. the prefetched data
will never be unused.
Normally, the number of prefetch will be pcp->batch(default=31 and has
an upper limit of (PAGE_SHIFT * 8)=96 on x86_64) but in the case of
pcp's pages get all drained, it will be pcp->count which has an upper
limit of pcp->high. pcp->high, although has a default value of 186
(pcp->batch=31 * 6), can be changed by user through
/proc/sys/vm/percpu_pagelist_fraction and there is no software upper
limit so could be large, like several thousand. For this reason, only
the first pcp->batch number of page's buddy structure is prefetched to
avoid excessive prefetching.
In the meantime, there are two concerns:
1. the prefetch could potentially evict existing cachelines, especially
for L1D cache since it is not huge
2. there is some additional instruction overhead, namely calculating
buddy pfn twice
For 1, it's hard to say, this microbenchmark though shows good result
but the actual benefit of this patch will be workload/CPU dependant;
For 2, since the calculation is a XOR on two local variables, it's
expected in many cases that cycles spent will be offset by reduced
memory latency later. This is especially true for NUMA machines where
multiple CPUs are contending on zone->lock and the most time consuming
part under zone->lock is the wait of 'struct page' cacheline of the
to-be-freed pages and their buddies.
Test with will-it-scale/page_fault1 full load:
kernel Broadwell(2S) Skylake(2S) Broadwell(4S) Skylake(4S)
v4.16-rc2+ 9034215 7971818 13667135 15677465
patch2/3 9536374 +5.6% 8314710 +4.3% 14070408 +3.0% 16675866 +6.4%
this patch 10180856 +6.8% 8506369 +2.3% 14756865 +4.9% 17325324 +3.9%
Note: this patch's performance improvement percent is against patch2/3.
(Changelog stolen from Dave Hansen and Mel Gorman's comments at
http://lkml.kernel.org/r/148a42d8-8306-2f2f-7f7c-86bc118f8ccd@intel.com)
[aaron.lu@intel.com: use helper function, avoid disordering pages]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180301062845.26038-4-aaron.lu@intel.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180320113146.GB24737@intel.com
[aaron.lu@intel.com: v4]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180301062845.26038-4-aaron.lu@intel.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180309082431.GB30868@intel.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180301062845.26038-4-aaron.lu@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com>
Suggested-by: Ying Huang <ying.huang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Kemi Wang <kemi.wang@intel.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
97334162e4