[PATCH v7 0/2] mm: improve large folio readahead for exec memory

[Andrew Morton]

On Mon,  1 Jun 2026 03:21:16 -0700 Usama Arif <usama.arif at linux.dev> wrote:

> Hopefully this is the last revision. The only change from the previous
> revision is that the logic for deciding THP order was simplified and
> the max is now capped to 2M. Thanks Pedro and Jan for the suggestion
> and the dicusssion!
> 
> The benchmark results on Neoverse V2 (Grace), arm64 with 64K base pages,
> 512MB executable file on ext4, averaged over 3 runs:
> 
>   Phase      | Baseline     | Patched      | Improvement
>   -----------|--------------|--------------|------------------
>   Cold fault | 83.4 ms      | 41.3 ms      | 50% faster
>   Random     | 76.0 ms      | 58.3 ms      | 23% faster
> 
> The patches are on top of mm-unstable from 28 May
> (8a74e22643189e0ae339afc91110ddb4cab1941b) which include patch [1]
> that make mmap_miss accounting symmetric for VM_SEQ_READ which was pointed
> out by sashiko in the previous revision.

We lost the [0/N] cover letter.  Please do retain (and maintain!) that
across revisions.  I used the one from the v6 patchset.

> v6 -> v7: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260528165635.2068012-1-usama.arif@linux.dev/
> - Simplify logic and just cap the max THP order to 2M (Pedro and Jan)

Here's how v7 altered mm.git:


 mm/filemap.c |   15 +++++----------
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)

--- a/mm/filemap.c~b
+++ a/mm/filemap.c
@@ -3320,17 +3320,12 @@ static struct file *do_sync_mmap_readahe
 	/* Use the readahead code, even if readahead is disabled */
 	if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE) && (vm_flags & VM_HUGEPAGE)) {
 		/*
-		 * Preserve PMD-sized readahead where it already fits in
-		 * the page cache. Otherwise cap the new fallback path at
-		 * 2MB: this is the common PMD-sized hugepage size, and it
-		 * avoids memory pressure from very large forced readahead
-		 * when mapping_max_folio_order() is high (for example,
-		 * 128MB with 64K base pages on arm64).
+		 * Cap max THP order at 2MB: this is the common PMD-sized
+		 * hugepage size, and it avoids memory pressure from very
+		 * large forced readahead when mapping_max_folio_order() is
+		 * high (for example, 128MB with 64K base pages on arm64).
 		 */
-		if (HPAGE_PMD_ORDER <= MAX_PAGECACHE_ORDER) {
-			force_thp_readahead = true;
-			thp_order = HPAGE_PMD_ORDER;
-		} else if (mapping_large_folio_support(mapping)) {
+		if (mapping_large_folio_support(mapping)) {
 			force_thp_readahead = true;
 			thp_order = min_t(unsigned int,
 					  mapping_max_folio_order(mapping),
_