Re: [RFC PATCH 0/1] Buddy allocator like folio split

[David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>]

On 18.10.24 21:44, Yang Shi wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 12:11 PM Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 18 Oct 2024, at 14:42, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>
>>> On 09.10.24 00:37, Zi Yan wrote:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Matthew and I have discussed about a different way of splitting large
>>>> folios. Instead of split one folio uniformly into the same order smaller
>>>> ones, doing buddy allocator like split can reduce the total number of
>>>> resulting folios, the amount of memory needed for multi-index xarray
>>>> split, and keep more large folios after a split. In addition, both
>>>> Hugh[1] and Ryan[2] had similar suggestions before.
>>>>
>>>> The patch is an initial implementation. It passes simple order-9 to
>>>> lower order split tests for anonymous folios and pagecache folios.
>>>> There are still a lot of TODOs to make it upstream. But I would like to gather
>>>> feedbacks before that.
>>>
>>> Interesting, but I don't see any actual users besides the debug/test interface wired up.
>>
>> Right. I am working on it now, since two potential users, anon large folios
>> and truncate, might need more sophisticated implementation to fully take
>> advantage of this new split.
>>
>> For anon large folios, this might be open to debate, if only a subset of
>> orders are enabled, I assume folio_split() can only split to smaller
>> folios with the enabled orders. For example, to get one order-0 from
>> an order-9, and only order-4 (64KB on x86) is enabled, folio_split()
>> can only split the order-9 to 16 order-0s, 31 order-4s, unless we are
>> OK with anon large folios with not enabled orders appear in the system.
> 
> For anon large folios, deferred split may be a problem too. The
> deferred split is typically used to free the unmapped subpages by, for
> example, MADV_DONTNEED. But we don't know which subpages are unmapped
> without reading their _mapcount by iterating every subpages.

Yeah, and I am still hoping we can get rid of the _mapcounts.

If you know a folio is exclusive, at least synchronously during 
MADV_DONTNEED you know what you can try split. Deferred would require an 
rmap walk -- if it's really worth it.

-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb