mm-optimize-do_wp_page-for-fresh-pages-in-local-lru-pagevecs.patch removed from -mm tree

The patch titled
Subject: mm: optimize do_wp_page() for fresh pages in local LRU pagevecs
has been removed from the -mm tree. Its filename was
mm-optimize-do_wp_page-for-fresh-pages-in-local-lru-pagevecs.patch

This patch was dropped because it was merged into mainline or a subsystem tree

------------------------------------------------------
From: David Hildenbrand <[email protected]>
Subject: mm: optimize do_wp_page() for fresh pages in local LRU pagevecs

For example, if a page just got swapped in via a read fault, the LRU pagevecs might still hold a reference to the page. If we trigger a write fault on such a page, the additional reference from the LRU pagevecs will prohibit reusing the page.

Let's conditionally drain the local LRU pagevecs when we stumble over a !PageLRU() page. We cannot easily drain remote LRU pagevecs and it might not be desirable performance-wise. Consequently, this will only avoid copying in some cases.

Add a simple "page_count(page) > 3" check first but keep the "page_count(page) > 1 + PageSwapCache(page)" check in place, as we want to minimize cases where we remove a page from the swapcache but won't be able to reuse it, for example, because another process has it mapped R/O, to not affect reclaim.

We cannot easily handle the following cases and we will always have to copy:

(1) The page is referenced in the LRU pagevecs of other CPUs. We really would have to drain the LRU pagevecs of all CPUs -- most probably copying is much cheaper.

(2) The page is already PageLRU() but is getting moved between LRU lists, for example, for activation (e.g., mark_page_accessed()), deactivation (MADV_COLD), or lazyfree (MADV_FREE). We'd have to drain mostly unconditionally, which might be bad performance-wise. Most probably this won't happen too often in practice.

Note that there are other reasons why an anon page might temporarily not be PageLRU(): for example, compaction and migration have to isolate LRU pages from the LRU lists first (isolate_lru_page()), moving them to temporary local lists and clearing PageLRU() and holding an additional reference on the page. In that case, we'll always copy.

This change seems to be fairly effective with the reproducer [1] shared by Nadav, as long as writeback is done synchronously, for example, using zram. However, with asynchronous writeback, we'll usually fail to free the swapcache because the page is still under writeback: something we cannot easily optimize for, and maybe it's not really relevant in practice.

[1] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]

---

 mm/memory.c |   10 +++++++++-
 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

@@ -3294,7 +3294,15 @@ static vm_fault_t do_wp_page(struct vm_f
 		 *
 		 * PageKsm() doesn't necessarily raise the page refcount.
 		 */
-		if (PageKsm(page) || page_count(page) > 1 + PageSwapCache(page))
+		if (PageKsm(page) || page_count(page) > 3)
+			goto copy;
+		if (!PageLRU(page))
+			/*
+			 * Note: We cannot easily detect+handle references from
+			 * remote LRU pagevecs or references to PageLRU() pages.
+			 */
+			lru_add_drain();
+		if (page_count(page) > 1 + PageSwapCache(page))
 			goto copy;
 		if (!trylock_page(page))
 			goto copy;

_

Patches currently in -mm which might be from [email protected] are