change_pte_range is called from task work context to mark PTEs for
receiving NUMA faulting hints. If the marked pages are dirty then
migration may fail. Some filesystems cannot migrate dirty pages without
blocking so are skipped in MIGRATE_ASYNC mode which just wastes CPU.
Even when they can, it can be a waste of cycles when the pages are
shared forcing higher scan rates. This patch avoids marking shared
dirty pages for hinting faults but also will skip a migration if the
page was dirtied after the scanner updated a clean page.
This is most noticeable running the NASA Parallel Benchmark when backed
by btrfs, the default root filesystem for some distributions, but also
noticeable when using XFS.
The following are results from a 4-socket machine running a 4.16-rc4
kernel with some scheduler patches that are pending for the next merge
window.
4.16.0-rc4 4.16.0-rc4
schedtip-20180309 nodirty-v1
Time cg.D 459.07 ( 0.00%) 444.21 ( 3.24%)
Time ep.D 76.96 ( 0.00%) 77.69 ( -0.95%)
Time is.D 25.55 ( 0.00%) 27.85 ( -9.00%)
Time lu.D 601.58 ( 0.00%) 596.87 ( 0.78%)
Time mg.D 107.73 ( 0.00%) 108.22 ( -0.45%)
is.D regresses slightly in terms of absolute time but note that that
particular load varies quite a bit from run to run. The more relevant
observation is the total system CPU usage.
4.16.0-rc4 4.16.0-rc4
schedtip-20180309 nodirty-v1
User 71471.91 70627.04
System 11078.96 8256.13
Elapsed 661.66 632.74
That is a substantial drop in system CPU usage and overall the workload
completes faster. The NUMA balancing statistics are also interesting
NUMA base PTE updates 111407972 139848884
NUMA huge PMD updates 206506 264869
NUMA page range updates 217139044 275461812
NUMA hint faults 4300924 3719784
NUMA hint local faults 3012539 3416618
NUMA hint local percent 70 91
NUMA pages migrated 1517487 1358420
While more PTEs are scanned due to changes in what faults are gathered,
it's clear that a far higher percentage of faults are local as the bulk
of the remote hits were dirty pages that, in this case with btrfs, had
no chance of migrating.
The following is a comparison when using XFS as that is a more realistic
filesystem choice for a data partition
4.16.0-rc4 4.16.0-rc4
schedtip-20180309 nodirty-v1r47
Time cg.D 485.28 ( 0.00%) 442.62 ( 8.79%)
Time ep.D 77.68 ( 0.00%) 77.54 ( 0.18%)
Time is.D 26.44 ( 0.00%) 24.79 ( 6.24%)
Time lu.D 597.46 ( 0.00%) 597.11 ( 0.06%)
Time mg.D 142.65 ( 0.00%) 105.83 ( 25.81%)
That is a reasonable gain on two relatively long-lived workloads. While
not presented, there is also a substantial drop in system CPu usage and
the NUMA balancing stats show similar improvements in locality as btrfs
did.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180326094334.zserdec62gwmmfqf@techsingularity.net
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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