• Minchan Kim's avatar
    mm: disable fault around on emulated access bit architecture · d0834a6c
    Minchan Kim authored
    fault_around aims to reduce minor faults of file-backed pages via
    speculative ahead pte mapping and relying on readahead logic.  However,
    on non-HW access bit architecture the benefit is highly limited because
    they should emulate the young bit with minor faults for reclaim's page
    aging algorithm.  IOW, we cannot reduce minor faults on those
    architectures.
    
    I did quick a test on my ARM machine.
    
    512M file mmap sequential every word read on eSATA drive 4 times.
    stddev is stable.
    
      = fault_around 4096 =
      elapsed time(usec): 6747645
    
      = fault_around 65536 =
      elapsed time(usec): 6709263
    
      0.5% gain.
    
    Even when I tested it with eMMC there is no gain because I guess with
    slow storage the major fault is the dominant factor.
    
    Also, fault_around has the side effect of shrinking slab more
    aggressively and causes higher vmpressure, so if such speculation fails,
    it can evict slab more which can result in page I/O (e.g., inode cache).
    In the end, it would make void any benefit of fault_around.
    
    So let's make the default "disabled" on those architectures.
    
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160518014229.GB21538@bboxSigned-off-by: default avatarMinchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
    Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill@shutemov.name>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    d0834a6c
memory.c 108 KB