mremap: remove LATENCY_LIMIT from mremap to reduce the number of TLB …

…shootdowns

Commit 5d19042 ("mremap: fix race between mremap() and page
cleanning") fixed races between mremap and other operations for both
file-backed and anonymous mappings.  The file-backed was the most
critical as it allowed the possibility that data could be changed on a
physical page after page_mkclean returned which could trigger data loss
or data integrity issues.

A customer reported that the cost of the TLBs for anonymous regressions
was excessive and resulting in a 30-50% drop in performance overall
since this commit on a microbenchmark.  Unfortunately I neither have
access to the test-case nor can I describe what it does other than
saying that mremap operations dominate heavily.

This patch removes the LATENCY_LIMIT to handle TLB flushes on a PMD
boundary instead of every 64 pages to reduce the number of TLB
shootdowns by a factor of 8 in the ideal case.  LATENCY_LIMIT was almost
certainly used originally to limit the PTL hold times but the latency
savings are likely offset by the cost of IPIs in many cases.  This patch
is not reported to completely restore performance but gets it within an
acceptable percentage.  The given metric here is simply described as
"higher is better".

Baseline that was known good
002:  Metric:       91.05
004:  Metric:      109.45
008:  Metric:       73.08
016:  Metric:       58.14
032:  Metric:       61.09
064:  Metric:       57.76
128:  Metric:       55.43

Current
001:  Metric:       54.98
002:  Metric:       56.56
004:  Metric:       41.22
008:  Metric:       35.96
016:  Metric:       36.45
032:  Metric:       35.71
064:  Metric:       35.73
128:  Metric:       34.96

With patch
001:  Metric:       61.43
002:  Metric:       81.64
004:  Metric:       67.92
008:  Metric:       51.67
016:  Metric:       50.47
032:  Metric:       52.29
064:  Metric:       50.01
128:  Metric:       49.04

So for low threads, it's not restored but for larger number of threads,
it's closer to the "known good" baseline.

Using a different mremap-intensive workload that is not representative
of the real workload there is little difference observed outside of
noise in the headline metrics However, the TLB shootdowns are reduced by
11% on average and at the peak, TLB shootdowns were reduced by 21%.
Interrupts were sampled every second while the workload ran to get those
figures.  It's known that the figures will vary as the
non-representative load is non-deterministic.

An alternative patch was posted that should have significantly reduced
the TLB flushes but unfortunately it does not perform as well as this
version on the customer test case.  If revisited, the two patches can
stack on top of each other.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Cc: Nadav Amit <[email protected]>
Cc: Dave Hansen <[email protected]>
Cc: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]>
Cc: Aaron Lu <[email protected]>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

mm/mremap.c

@@ -191,8 +191,6 @@ static void move_ptes(struct vm_area_struct *vma, pmd_t *old_pmd,
 		drop_rmap_locks(vma);
 }
 
-#define LATENCY_LIMIT	(64 * PAGE_SIZE)
-
 unsigned long move_page_tables(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
 		unsigned long old_addr, struct vm_area_struct *new_vma,
 		unsigned long new_addr, unsigned long len,
@@ -247,8 +245,6 @@ unsigned long move_page_tables(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
 		next = (new_addr + PMD_SIZE) & PMD_MASK;
 		if (extent > next - new_addr)
 			extent = next - new_addr;
-		if (extent > LATENCY_LIMIT)
-			extent = LATENCY_LIMIT;
 		move_ptes(vma, old_pmd, old_addr, old_addr + extent, new_vma,
 			  new_pmd, new_addr, need_rmap_locks, &need_flush);
 	}