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Joshua Hahn 0acc67c403 mm/page_alloc/vmstat: simplify refresh_cpu_vm_stats change detection
Patch series "mm/page_alloc: Batch callers of free_pcppages_bulk", v5.

Motivation & Approach
=====================

While testing workloads with high sustained memory pressure on large
machines in the Meta fleet (1Tb memory, 316 CPUs), we saw an unexpectedly
high number of softlockups.  Further investigation showed that the zone
lock in free_pcppages_bulk was being held for a long time, and was called
to free 2k+ pages over 100 times just during boot.

This causes starvation in other processes for the zone lock, which can
lead to the system stalling as multiple threads cannot make progress
without the locks.  We can see these issues manifesting as warnings:

[ 4512.591979] rcu: INFO: rcu_sched self-detected stall on CPU
[ 4512.604370] rcu:     20-....: (9312 ticks this GP) idle=a654/1/0x4000000000000000 softirq=309340/309344 fqs=5426
[ 4512.626401] rcu:              hardirqs   softirqs   csw/system
[ 4512.638793] rcu:      number:        0        145            0
[ 4512.651177] rcu:     cputime:       30      10410          174   ==> 10558(ms)
[ 4512.666657] rcu:     (t=21077 jiffies g=783665 q=1242213 ncpus=316)

While these warnings don't indicate a crash or a kernel panic, they do
point to the underlying issue of lock contention.  To prevent starvation
in both locks, batch the freeing of pages using pcp->batch.

Because free_pcppages_bulk is called with the pcp lock and acquires the
zone lock, relinquishing and reacquiring the locks are only effective when
both of them are broken together (unless the system was built with queued
spinlocks).  Thus, instead of modifying free_pcppages_bulk to break both
locks, batch the freeing from its callers instead.

A similar fix has been implemented in the Meta fleet, and we have seen
significantly less softlockups.

Testing
=======
The following are a few synthetic benchmarks, made on three machines. The
first is a large machine with 754GiB memory and 316 processors.
The second is a relatively smaller machine with 251GiB memory and 176
processors. The third and final is the smallest of the three, which has 62GiB
memory and 36 processors.

On all machines, I kick off a kernel build with -j$(nproc).
Negative delta is better (faster compilation).

Large machine (754GiB memory, 316 processors)
make -j$(nproc)
+------------+---------------+-----------+
| Metric (s) | Variation (%) | Delta(%)  |
+------------+---------------+-----------+
| real       |        0.8070 |  - 1.4865 |
| user       |        0.2823 |  + 0.4081 |
| sys        |        5.0267 |  -11.8737 |
+------------+---------------+-----------+

Medium machine (251GiB memory, 176 processors)
make -j$(nproc)
+------------+---------------+----------+
| Metric (s) | Variation (%) | Delta(%) |
+------------+---------------+----------+
| real       |        0.2806 |  +0.0351 |
| user       |        0.0994 |  +0.3170 |
| sys        |        0.6229 |  -0.6277 |
+------------+---------------+----------+

Small machine (62GiB memory, 36 processors)
make -j$(nproc)
+------------+---------------+----------+
| Metric (s) | Variation (%) | Delta(%) |
+------------+---------------+----------+
| real       |        0.1503 |  -2.6585 |
| user       |        0.0431 |  -2.2984 |
| sys        |        0.1870 |  -3.2013 |
+------------+---------------+----------+

Here, variation is the coefficient of variation, i.e.  standard deviation
/ mean.

Based on these results, it seems like there are varying degrees to how
much lock contention this reduces.  For the largest and smallest machines
that I ran the tests on, it seems like there is quite some significant
reduction.  There is also some performance increases visible from
userspace.

Interestingly, the performance gains don't scale with the size of the
machine, but rather there seems to be a dip in the gain there is for the
medium-sized machine.  One possible theory is that because the high
watermark depends on both memory and the number of local CPUs, what
impacts zone contention the most is not these individual values, but
rather the ratio of mem:processors.


This patch (of 5):

Currently, refresh_cpu_vm_stats returns an int, indicating how many
changes were made during its updates.  Using this information, callers
like vmstat_update can heuristically determine if more work will be done
in the future.

However, all of refresh_cpu_vm_stats's callers either (a) ignore the
result, only caring about performing the updates, or (b) only care about
whether changes were made, but not *how many* changes were made.

Simplify the code by returning a bool instead to indicate if updates
were made.

In addition, simplify fold_diff and decay_pcp_high to return a bool
for the same reason.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20251014145011.3427205-1-joshua.hahnjy@gmail.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20251014145011.3427205-2-joshua.hahnjy@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Joshua Hahn <joshua.hahnjy@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: SeongJae Park <sj@kernel.org>
Cc: Brendan Jackman <jackmanb@google.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>
Cc: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
2025-11-16 17:28:04 -08:00
Documentation mm/page_owner: update Documentation with 'show_handles' and 'show_stacks_handles' 2025-11-16 17:27:59 -08:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Replace the obsolete address of the FSF in the GFDL-1.2 2025-07-24 11:15:39 +02:00
arch drivers/base/node: fold register_node() into register_one_node() 2025-11-16 17:28:02 -08:00
block block-6.18-20251031 2025-10-31 12:57:19 -07:00
certs sign-file,extract-cert: use pkcs11 provider for OPENSSL MAJOR >= 3 2024-09-20 19:52:48 +03:00
crypto This push contains the following changes: 2025-10-10 08:56:16 -07:00
drivers drivers/base/node: fold unregister_node() into unregister_one_node() 2025-11-16 17:28:03 -08:00
fs mm: consistently use current->mm in mm_get_unmapped_area() 2025-11-16 17:27:57 -08:00
include mm/page_alloc/vmstat: simplify refresh_cpu_vm_stats change detection 2025-11-16 17:28:04 -08:00
init printk changes for 6.18 2025-10-04 11:13:11 -07:00
io_uring mm: consistently use current->mm in mm_get_unmapped_area() 2025-11-16 17:27:57 -08:00
ipc namespace-6.18-rc1 2025-09-29 11:20:29 -07:00
kernel mm: consistently use current->mm in mm_get_unmapped_area() 2025-11-16 17:27:57 -08:00
lib lib/test_vmalloc: remove xfail condition check 2025-11-16 17:27:53 -08:00
mm mm/page_alloc/vmstat: simplify refresh_cpu_vm_stats change detection 2025-11-16 17:28:04 -08:00
net Including fixes from bluetooth and wireless. 2025-11-06 08:52:30 -08:00
rust rust: kbuild: workaround `rustdoc` doctests modifier bug 2025-11-04 00:00:06 +01:00
samples Char/Misc/IIO/Binder changes for 6.18-rc1 2025-10-04 16:26:32 -07:00
scripts scripts/decode_stacktrace.sh: fix build ID and PC source parsing 2025-11-09 21:19:45 -08:00
security integrity-v6.18 2025-10-05 10:48:33 -07:00
sound ASoC: Fixes for v6.18 2025-10-30 13:08:08 +01:00
tools selftests: update ksm inheritance tests for prctl fork/exec 2025-11-16 17:27:55 -08:00
usr gen_init_cpio: Ignore fsync() returning EINVAL on pipes 2025-10-07 09:53:05 -07:00
virt KVM x86 fixes for 6.18: 2025-10-18 10:25:43 +02:00
.clang-format memblock: drop for_each_free_mem_pfn_range_in_zone_from() 2025-09-14 08:49:03 +03:00
.clippy.toml rust: clean Rust 1.88.0's warning about `clippy::disallowed_macros` configuration 2025-05-07 00:11:47 +02:00
.cocciconfig
.editorconfig .editorconfig: remove trim_trailing_whitespace option 2024-06-13 16:47:52 +02:00
.get_maintainer.ignore MAINTAINERS: remove Alyssa Rosenzweig 2025-09-18 21:17:31 +02:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set diff driver for Rust source code files 2023-05-31 17:48:25 +02:00
.gitignore .gitignore: ignore compile_commands.json globally 2025-08-12 15:53:55 -07:00
.mailmap MAINTAINERS: update David Hildenbrand's email address 2025-11-15 10:52:01 -08:00
.pylintrc tools: docs: parse-headers.py: move it from sphinx dir 2025-08-29 15:54:42 -06:00
.rustfmt.toml rust: add `.rustfmt.toml` 2022-09-28 09:02:20 +02:00
COPYING COPYING: state that all contributions really are covered by this file 2020-02-10 13:32:20 -08:00
CREDITS MAINTAINERS: mark ISDN subsystem as orphan 2025-10-27 17:49:45 -07:00
Kbuild sched: Make migrate_{en,dis}able() inline 2025-09-25 09:57:16 +02:00
Kconfig io_uring: Rename KConfig to Kconfig 2025-02-19 14:53:27 -07:00
MAINTAINERS MAINTAINERS: update David Hildenbrand's email address 2025-11-15 10:52:01 -08:00
Makefile Linux 6.18-rc5 2025-11-09 15:10:19 -08:00
README README: Fix spelling 2024-03-18 03:36:32 -06:00

README

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.