thp: khugepaged
Add khugepaged to relocate fragmented pages into hugepages if new hugepages become available. (this is indipendent of the defrag logic that will have to make new hugepages available) The fundamental reason why khugepaged is unavoidable, is that some memory can be fragmented and not everything can be relocated. So when a virtual machine quits and releases gigabytes of hugepages, we want to use those freely available hugepages to create huge-pmd in the other virtual machines that may be running on fragmented memory, to maximize the CPU efficiency at all times. The scan is slow, it takes nearly zero cpu time, except when it copies data (in which case it means we definitely want to pay for that cpu time) so it seems a good tradeoff. In addition to the hugepages being released by other process releasing memory, we have the strong suspicion that the performance impact of potentially defragmenting hugepages during or before each page fault could lead to more performance inconsistency than allocating small pages at first and having them collapsed into large pages later... if they prove themselfs to be long lived mappings (khugepaged scan is slow so short lived mappings have low probability to run into khugepaged if compared to long lived mappings). Signed-off-by:Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Acked-by:
Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent
79134171
Please register or sign in to comment