[RFC][PATCH 0/6] Another go at speculative page faults

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Mon Oct 20 2014 - 18:43:03 EST


Hi,

I figured I'd give my 2010 speculative fault series another spin:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/1/4/257

Since then I think many of the outstanding issues have changed sufficiently to
warrant another go. In particular Al Viro's delayed fput seems to have made it
entirely 'normal' to delay fput(). Lai Jiangshan's SRCU rewrite provided us
with call_srcu() and my preemptible mmu_gather removed the TLB flushes from
under the PTL.

The code needs way more attention but builds a kernel and runs the
micro-benchmark so I figured I'd post it before sinking more time into it.

I realize the micro-bench is about as good as it gets for this series and not
very realistic otherwise, but I think it does show the potential benefit the
approach has.

(patches go against .18-rc1+)

---

Using Kamezawa's multi-fault micro-bench from: https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/1/6/28

My Ivy Bridge EP (2*10*2) has a ~58% improvement in pagefault throughput:

PRE:

root@ivb-ep:~# perf stat -e page-faults,cache-misses --repeat 5 ./multi-fault 20

Performance counter stats for './multi-fault 20' (5 runs):

149,441,555 page-faults ( +- 1.25% )
2,153,651,828 cache-misses ( +- 1.09% )

60.003082014 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.00% )

POST:

root@ivb-ep:~# perf stat -e page-faults,cache-misses --repeat 5 ./multi-fault 20

Performance counter stats for './multi-fault 20' (5 runs):

236,442,626 page-faults ( +- 0.08% )
2,796,353,939 cache-misses ( +- 1.01% )

60.002792431 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.00% )


My Ivy Bridge EX (4*15*2) has a ~78% improvement in pagefault throughput:

PRE:

root@ivb-ex:~# perf stat -e page-faults,cache-misses --repeat 5 ./multi-fault 60

Performance counter stats for './multi-fault 60' (5 runs):

105,789,078 page-faults ( +- 2.24% )
1,314,072,090 cache-misses ( +- 1.17% )

60.009243533 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.00% )

POST:

root@ivb-ex:~# perf stat -e page-faults,cache-misses --repeat 5 ./multi-fault 60

Performance counter stats for './multi-fault 60' (5 runs):

187,751,767 page-faults ( +- 2.24% )
1,792,758,664 cache-misses ( +- 2.30% )

60.011611579 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.00% )

(I've not yet looked at why the EX sucks chunks compared to the EP box, I
suspect we contend on other locks, but it could be anything.)

---

arch/x86/mm/fault.c | 35 ++-
include/linux/mm.h | 19 +-
include/linux/mm_types.h | 5 +
kernel/fork.c | 1 +
mm/init-mm.c | 1 +
mm/internal.h | 18 ++
mm/memory.c | 672 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------------
mm/mmap.c | 101 +++++--
8 files changed, 544 insertions(+), 308 deletions(-)

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/