[PATCH v3] mm: Avoid unnecessary page fault retires on shared memory types

[Johannes Weiner]

On Tue, May 24, 2022 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Peter Xu wrote:
> I observed that for each of the shared file-backed page faults, we're very
> likely to retry one more time for the 1st write fault upon no page.  It's
> because we'll need to release the mmap lock for dirty rate limit purpose
> with balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() (in fault_dirty_shared_page()).
> 
> Then after that throttling we return VM_FAULT_RETRY.
> 
> We did that probably because VM_FAULT_RETRY is the only way we can return
> to the fault handler at that time telling it we've released the mmap lock.
> 
> However that's not ideal because it's very likely the fault does not need
> to be retried at all since the pgtable was well installed before the
> throttling, so the next continuous fault (including taking mmap read lock,
> walk the pgtable, etc.) could be in most cases unnecessary.
> 
> It's not only slowing down page faults for shared file-backed, but also add
> more mmap lock contention which is in most cases not needed at all.
> 
> To observe this, one could try to write to some shmem page and look at
> "pgfault" value in /proc/vmstat, then we should expect 2 counts for each
> shmem write simply because we retried, and vm event "pgfault" will capture
> that.
> 
> To make it more efficient, add a new VM_FAULT_COMPLETED return code just to
> show that we've completed the whole fault and released the lock.  It's also
> a hint that we should very possibly not need another fault immediately on
> this page because we've just completed it.
> 
> This patch provides a ~12% perf boost on my aarch64 test VM with a simple
> program sequentially dirtying 400MB shmem file being mmap()ed and these are
> the time it needs:
> 
>   Before: 650.980 ms (+-1.94%)
>   After:  569.396 ms (+-1.38%)
> 
> I believe it could help more than that.
> 
> We need some special care on GUP and the s390 pgfault handler (for gmap
> code before returning from pgfault), the rest changes in the page fault
> handlers should be relatively straightforward.
> 
> Another thing to mention is that mm_account_fault() does take this new
> fault as a generic fault to be accounted, unlike VM_FAULT_RETRY.
> 
> I explicitly didn't touch hmm_vma_fault() and break_ksm() because they do
> not handle VM_FAULT_RETRY even with existing code, so I'm literally keeping
> them as-is.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Peter Xu <peterx at redhat.com>

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes at cmpxchg.org>