Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] Introduce a bulk order-0 page allocator for sunrpc

[Jesper Dangaard Brouer]

On Wed, 24 Feb 2021 10:26:00 +0000
Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> This is a prototype series that introduces a bulk order-0 page allocator
> with sunrpc being the first user. The implementation is not particularly
> efficient and the intention is to iron out what the semantics of the API
> should be. That said, sunrpc was reported to have reduced allocation
> latency when refilling a pool.

I also have a use-case in page_pool, and I've been testing with the
earlier patches, results are here[1]

[1] https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-project/blob/master/areas/mem/page_pool06_alloc_pages_bulk.org

Awesome to see this newer patchset! thanks a lot for working on this!
I'll run some new tests based on this.

> As a side-note, while the implementation could be more efficient, it
> would require fairly deep surgery in numerous places. The lock scope would
> need to be significantly reduced, particularly as vmstat, per-cpu and the
> buddy allocator have different locking protocol that overal -- e.g. all
> partially depend on irqs being disabled at various points. Secondly,
> the core of the allocator deals with single pages where as both the bulk
> allocator and per-cpu allocator operate in batches. All of that has to
> be reconciled with all the existing users and their constraints (memory
> offline, CMA and cpusets being the trickiest).

As you can see in[1], I'm getting a significant speedup from this.  I
guess that the cost of finding the "zone" is higher than I expected, as
this basically what we/you amortize for the bulk.

 
> In terms of semantics required by new users, my preference is that a pair
> of patches be applied -- the first which adds the required semantic to
> the bulk allocator and the second which adds the new user.
> 
> Patch 1 of this series is a cleanup to sunrpc, it could be merged
> 	separately but is included here for convenience.
> 
> Patch 2 is the prototype bulk allocator
> 
> Patch 3 is the sunrpc user. Chuck also has a patch which further caches
> 	pages but is not included in this series. It's not directly
> 	related to the bulk allocator and as it caches pages, it might
> 	have other concerns (e.g. does it need a shrinker?)
> 
> This has only been lightly tested on a low-end NFS server. It did not break
> but would benefit from an evaluation to see how much, if any, the headline
> performance changes. The biggest concern is that a light test case showed
> that there are a *lot* of bulk requests for 1 page which gets delegated to
> the normal allocator.  The same criteria should apply to any other users.

If you change local_irq_save(flags) to local_irq_disable() then you can
likely get better performance for 1 page requests via this API.  This
limits the API to be used in cases where IRQs are enabled (which is
most cases).  (For my use-case I will not do 1 page requests).


-- 
Best regards,
  Jesper Dangaard Brouer
  MSc.CS, Principal Kernel Engineer at Red Hat
  LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brouer