• Mel Gorman's avatar
    mm: Check if PTE is already allocated during page fault · 4fd01770
    Mel Gorman authored
    With transparent hugepage support, handle_mm_fault() has to be careful
    that a normal PMD has been established before handling a PTE fault. To
    achieve this, it used __pte_alloc() directly instead of pte_alloc_map
    as pte_alloc_map is unsafe to run against a huge PMD. pte_offset_map()
    is called once it is known the PMD is safe.
    
    pte_alloc_map() is smart enough to check if a PTE is already present
    before calling __pte_alloc but this check was lost. As a consequence,
    PTEs may be allocated unnecessarily and the page table lock taken.
    Thi useless PTE does get cleaned up but it's a performance hit which
    is visible in page_test from aim9.
    
    This patch simply re-adds the check normally done by pte_alloc_map to
    check if the PTE needs to be allocated before taking the page table
    lock. The effect is noticable in page_test from aim9.
    
     AIM9
                     2.6.38-vanilla 2.6.38-checkptenone
     creat-clo      446.10 ( 0.00%)   424.47 (-5.10%)
     page_test       38.10 ( 0.00%)    42.04 ( 9.37%)
     brk_test        52.45 ( 0.00%)    51.57 (-1.71%)
     exec_test      382.00 ( 0.00%)   456.90 (16.39%)
     fork_test       60.11 ( 0.00%)    67.79 (11.34%)
     MMTests Statistics: duration
     Total Elapsed Time (seconds)                611.90    612.22
    
    (While this affects 2.6.38, it is a performance rather than a
    functional bug and normally outside the rules -stable. While the big
    performance differences are to a microbench, the difference in fork
    and exec performance may be significant enough that -stable wants to
    consider the patch)
    Reported-by: default avatarRaz Ben Yehuda <raziebe@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
    Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
    Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
    [ Picked this up from the AutoNUMA tree to help
      it upstream and to allow apples-to-apples
      performance comparisons. ]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
    4fd01770
huge_memory.c 63.5 KB