[PATCH v6 0/9] variable-order, large folios for anonymous memory

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2023 at 10:19:48AM +0000, Ryan Roberts wrote:
> On 13/11/2023 05:18, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > My hope is to abolish the 64kB page size configuration.  ie instead of
> > using the mixture of page sizes that you currently are -- 64k and
> > 1M (right?  Order-0, and order-4)
> 
> Not quite; the contpte-size for a 64K page size is 2M/order-5. (and yes, it is
> 64K/order-4 for a 4K page size, and 2M/order-7 for a 16K page size. I agree that
> intuitively you would expect the order to remain constant, but it doesn't).
> 
> The "recommend" setting above will actually enable order-3 as well even though
> there is no HW benefit to this. So the full set of available memory sizes here is:
> 
> 64K/order-0, 512K/order-3, 2M/order-5, 512M/order-13
> 
> > , that 4k, 64k and 2MB (order-0,
> > order-4 and order-9) will provide better performance.
> > 
> > Have you run any experiements with a 4kB page size?
> 
> Agree that would be interesting with 64K small-sized THP enabled. And I'd love
> to get to a world were we universally deal in variable sized chunks of memory,
> aligned on 4K boundaries.
> 
> In my experience though, there are still some performance benefits to 64K base
> page vs 4K+contpte; the page tables are more cache efficient for the former case
> - 64K of memory is described by 8 bytes in the former vs 8x16=128 bytes in the
> latter. In practice the HW will still only read 8 bytes in the latter but that's
> taking up a full cache line vs the former where a single cache line stores 8x
> 64K entries.

This is going to depend on your workload though -- if you're using more
2MB than 64kB, you get to elide a layer of page table with 4k base,
rather than taking up 4 cache lines with a 64k base.