Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH v5 00/21] Free some vmemmap pages of hugetlb page | From | David Hildenbrand <> | Date | Fri, 20 Nov 2020 19:00:15 +0100 |
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On 20.11.20 18:45, Mike Kravetz wrote: > On 11/20/20 1:43 AM, David Hildenbrand wrote: >> On 20.11.20 10:39, Michal Hocko wrote: >>> On Fri 20-11-20 10:27:05, David Hildenbrand wrote: >>>> On 20.11.20 09:42, Michal Hocko wrote: >>>>> On Fri 20-11-20 14:43:04, Muchun Song wrote: >>>>> [...] >>>>> >>>>> Thanks for improving the cover letter and providing some numbers. I have >>>>> only glanced through the patchset because I didn't really have more time >>>>> to dive depply into them. >>>>> >>>>> Overall it looks promissing. To summarize. I would prefer to not have >>>>> the feature enablement controlled by compile time option and the kernel >>>>> command line option should be opt-in. I also do not like that freeing >>>>> the pool can trigger the oom killer or even shut the system down if no >>>>> oom victim is eligible. >>>>> >>>>> One thing that I didn't really get to think hard about is what is the >>>>> effect of vmemmap manipulation wrt pfn walkers. pfn_to_page can be >>>>> invalid when racing with the split. How do we enforce that this won't >>>>> blow up? >>>> >>>> I have the same concerns - the sections are online the whole time and >>>> anybody with pfn_to_online_page() can grab them >>>> >>>> I think we have similar issues with memory offlining when removing the >>>> vmemmap, it's just very hard to trigger and we can easily protect by >>>> grabbing the memhotplug lock. >>> >>> I am not sure we can/want to span memory hotplug locking out to all pfn >>> walkers. But you are right that the underlying problem is similar but >>> much harder to trigger because vmemmaps are only removed when the >>> physical memory is hotremoved and that happens very seldom. Maybe it >>> will happen more with virtualization usecases. But this work makes it >>> even more tricky. If a pfn walker races with a hotremove then it would >>> just blow up when accessing the unmapped physical address space. For >>> this feature a pfn walker would just grab a real struct page re-used for >>> some unpredictable use under its feet. Any failure would be silent and >>> hard to debug. >> >> Right, we don't want the memory hotplug locking, thus discussions regarding rcu. Luckily, for now I never saw a BUG report regarding this - maybe because the time between memory offlining (offline_pages()) and memory/vmemmap getting removed (try_remove_memory()) is just too long. Someone would have to sleep after pfn_to_online_page() for quite a while to trigger it. >> >>> >>> [...] >>>> To keep things easy, maybe simply never allow to free these hugetlb pages >>>> again for now? If they were reserved during boot and the vmemmap condensed, >>>> then just let them stick around for all eternity. >>> >>> Not sure I understand. Do you propose to only free those vmemmap pages >>> when the pool is initialized during boot time and never allow to free >>> them up? That would certainly make it safer and maybe even simpler wrt >>> implementation. >> >> Exactly, let's keep it simple for now. I guess most use cases of this (virtualization, databases, ...) will allocate hugepages during boot and never free them. > > Not sure if I agree with that last statement. Database and virtualization > use cases from my employer allocate allocate hugetlb pages after boot. It > is shortly after boot, but still not from boot/kernel command line.
Right, but the ones that care about this optimization for now could be converted, I assume? I mean we are talking about "opt-in" from sysadmins, so requiring to specify a different cmdline parameter does not sound to weird to me. And it should simplify a first version quite a lot.
The more I think about this, the more I believe doing these vmemmap modifications after boot are very dangerous.
> > Somewhat related, but not exactly addressing this issue ... > > One idea discussed in a previous patch set was to disable PMD/huge page > mapping of vmemmap if this feature was enabled. This would eliminate a bunch > of the complex code doing page table manipulation. It does not address > the issue of struct page pages going away which is being discussed here, > but it could be a way to simply the first version of this code. If this > is going to be an 'opt in' feature as previously suggested, then eliminating > the PMD/huge page vmemmap mapping may be acceptable. My guess is that > sysadmins would only 'opt in' if they expect most of system memory to be used > by hugetlb pages. We certainly have database and virtualization use cases > where this is true.
It sounds like a hack to me, which does not fully solve the problem. But yeah, it's a simplification.
-- Thanks,
David / dhildenb
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