[RFC PATCH v1 00/57] Boot-time page size selection for arm64

[Florian Fainelli]

On 10/14/24 03:55, Ryan Roberts wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Patch bomb incoming... This covers many subsystems, so I've included a core set
> of people on the full series and additionally included maintainers on relevant
> patches. I haven't included those maintainers on this cover letter since the
> numbers were far too big for it to work. But I've included a link to this cover
> letter on each patch, so they can hopefully find their way here. For follow up
> submissions I'll break it up by subsystem, but for now thought it was important
> to show the full picture.
> 
> This RFC series implements support for boot-time page size selection within the
> arm64 kernel. arm64 supports 3 base page sizes (4K, 16K, 64K), but to date, page
> size has been selected at compile-time, meaning the size is baked into a given
> kernel image. As use of larger-than-4K page sizes become more prevalent this
> starts to present a problem for distributions. Boot-time page size selection
> enables the creation of a single kernel image, which can be told which page size
> to use on the kernel command line.
> 
> Why is having an image-per-page size problematic?
> =================================================
> 
> Many traditional distros are now supporting both 4K and 64K. And this means
> managing 2 kernel packages, along with drivers for each. For some, it means
> multiple installer flavours and multiple ISOs. All of this adds up to a
> less-than-ideal level of complexity. Additionally, Android now supports 4K and
> 16K kernels. I'm told having to explicitly manage their KABI for each kernel is
> painful, and the extra flash space required for both kernel images and the
> duplicated modules has been problematic. Boot-time page size selection solves
> all of this.
> 
> Additionally, in starting to think about the longer term deployment story for
> D128 page tables, which Arm architecture now supports, a lot of the same
> problems need to be solved, so this work sets us up nicely for that.
> 
> So what's the down side?
> ========================
> 
> Well nothing's free; Various static allocations in the kernel image must be
> sized for the worst case (largest supported page size), so image size is in line
> with size of 64K compile-time image. So if you're interested in 4K or 16K, there
> is a slight increase to the image size. But I expect that problem goes away if
> you're compressing the image - its just some extra zeros. At boot-time, I expect
> we could free the unused static storage once we know the page size - although
> that would be a follow up enhancement.
> 
> And then there is performance. Since PAGE_SIZE and friends are no longer
> compile-time constants, we must look up their values and do arithmetic at
> runtime instead of compile-time. My early perf testing suggests this is
> inperceptible for real-world workloads, and only has small impact on
> microbenchmarks - more on this below.
> 
> Approach
> ========
> 
> The basic idea is to rid the source of any assumptions that PAGE_SIZE and
> friends are compile-time constant, but in a way that allows the compiler to
> perform the same optimizations as was previously being done if they do turn out
> to be compile-time constant. Where constants are required, we use limits;
> PAGE_SIZE_MIN and PAGE_SIZE_MAX. See commit log in patch 1 for full description
> of all the classes of problems to solve.
> 
> By default PAGE_SIZE_MIN=PAGE_SIZE_MAX=PAGE_SIZE. But an arch may opt-in to
> boot-time page size selection by defining PAGE_SIZE_MIN & PAGE_SIZE_MAX. arm64
> does this if the user selects the CONFIG_ARM64_BOOT_TIME_PAGE_SIZE Kconfig,
> which is an alternative to selecting a compile-time page size.
> 
> When boot-time page size is active, the arch pgtable geometry macro definitions
> resolve to something that can be configured at boot. The arm64 implementation in
> this series mainly uses global, __ro_after_init variables. I've tried using
> alternatives patching, but that performs worse than loading from memory; I think
> due to code size bloat.

FWIW, this paragraph was not entirely clear to me until I looked at 
patch 57 to see that the compile time page size selection had been 
retained, and could continue to be used as-is. It was somewhat implicit, 
but not IMHO explicit enough, not a big deal though.

Great work, thanks for doing that! This makes me wonder if we could 
leverage any of that to have a single kernel supporting both LPAE and 
!LPAE on ARM 32-bit, but that still seems like somewhat more difficult, 
largely due to the difference in the page table descriptor format (long 
vs. short).
-- 
Florian