= Transparent Hugepage Support = == Objective == Performance critical computing applications dealing with large memory working sets are already running on top of libhugetlbfs and in turn hugetlbfs. Transparent Hugepage Support is an alternative means of using huge pages for the backing of virtual memory with huge pages that supports the automatic promotion and demotion of page sizes and without the shortcomings of hugetlbfs. Currently it only works for anonymous memory mappings and tmpfs/shmem. But in the future it can expand to other filesystems. The reason applications are running faster is because of two factors. The first factor is almost completely irrelevant and it's not of significant interest because it'll also have the downside of requiring larger clear-page copy-page in page faults which is a potentially negative effect. The first factor consists in taking a single page fault for each 2M virtual region touched by userland (so reducing the enter/exit kernel frequency by a 512 times factor). This only matters the first time the memory is accessed for the lifetime of a memory mapping. The second long lasting and much more important factor will affect all subsequent accesses to the memory for the whole runtime of the application. The second factor consist of two components: 1) the TLB miss will run faster (especially with virtualization using nested pagetables but almost always also on bare metal without virtualization) and 2) a single TLB entry will be mapping a much larger amount of virtual memory in turn reducing the number of TLB misses. With virtualization and nested pagetables the TLB can be mapped of larger size only if both KVM and the Linux guest are using hugepages but a significant speedup already happens if only one of the two is using hugepages just because of the fact the TLB miss is going to run faster. == Design == - "graceful fallback": mm components which don't have transparent hugepage knowledge fall back to breaking huge pmd mapping into table of ptes and, if necessary, split a transparent hugepage. Therefore these components can continue working on the regular pages or regular pte mappings. - if a hugepage allocation fails because of memory fragmentation, regular pages should be gracefully allocated instead and mixed in the same vma without any failure or significant delay and without userland noticing - if some task quits and more hugepages become available (either immediately in the buddy or through the VM), guest physical memory backed by regular pages should be relocated on hugepages automatically (with khugepaged) - it doesn't require memory reservation and in turn it uses hugepages whenever possible (the only possible reservation here is kernelcore= to avoid unmovable pages to fragment all the memory but such a tweak is not specific to transparent hugepage support and it's a generic feature that applies to all dynamic high order allocations in the kernel) Transparent Hugepage Support maximizes the usefulness of free memory if compared to the reservation approach of hugetlbfs by allowing all unused memory to be used as cache or other movable (or even unmovable entities). It doesn't require reservation to prevent hugepage allocation failures to be noticeable from userland. It allows paging and all other advanced VM features to be available on the hugepages. It requires no modifications for applications to take advantage of it. Applications however can be further optimized to take advantage of this feature, like for example they've been optimized before to avoid a flood of mmap system calls for every malloc(4k). Optimizing userland is by far not mandatory and khugepaged already can take care of long lived page allocations even for hugepage unaware applications that deals with large amounts of memory. In certain cases when hugepages are enabled system wide, application may end up allocating more memory resources. An application may mmap a large region but only touch 1 byte of it, in that case a 2M page might be allocated instead of a 4k page for no good. This is why it's possible to disable hugepages system-wide and to only have them inside MADV_HUGEPAGE madvise regions. Embedded systems should enable hugepages only inside madvise regions to eliminate any risk of wasting any precious byte of memory and to only run faster. Applications that gets a lot of benefit from hugepages and that don't risk to lose memory by using hugepages, should use madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) on their critical mmapped regions. == sysfs == Transparent Hugepage Support for anonymous memory can be entirely disabled (mostly for debugging purposes) or only enabled inside MADV_HUGEPAGE regions (to avoid the risk of consuming more memory resources) or enabled system wide. This can be achieved with one of: echo always >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled echo madvise >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled echo never >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled It's also possible to limit defrag efforts in the VM to generate anonymous hugepages in case they're not immediately free to madvise regions or to never try to defrag memory and simply fallback to regular pages unless hugepages are immediately available. Clearly if we spend CPU time to defrag memory, we would expect to gain even more by the fact we use hugepages later instead of regular pages. This isn't always guaranteed, but it may be more likely in case the allocation is for a MADV_HUGEPAGE region. echo always >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag echo defer >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag echo defer+madvise >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag echo madvise >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag echo never >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag "always" means that an application requesting THP will stall on allocation failure and directly reclaim pages and compact memory in an effort to allocate a THP immediately. This may be desirable for virtual machines that benefit heavily from THP use and are willing to delay the VM start to utilise them. "defer" means that an application will wake kswapd in the background to reclaim pages and wake kcompactd to compact memory so that THP is available in the near future. It's the responsibility of khugepaged to then install the THP pages later. "defer+madvise" will enter direct reclaim and compaction like "always", but only for regions that have used madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE); all other regions will wake kswapd in the background to reclaim pages and wake kcompactd to compact memory so that THP is available in the near future. "madvise" will enter direct reclaim like "always" but only for regions that are have used madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE). This is the default behaviour. "never" should be self-explanatory. By default kernel tries to use huge zero page on read page fault to anonymous mapping. It's possible to disable huge zero page by writing 0 or enable it back by writing 1: echo 0 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/use_zero_page echo 1 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/use_zero_page Some userspace (such as a test program, or an optimized memory allocation library) may want to know the size (in bytes) of a transparent hugepage: cat /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hpage_pmd_size khugepaged will be automatically started when transparent_hugepage/enabled is set to "always" or "madvise, and it'll be automatically shutdown if it's set to "never". khugepaged runs usually at low frequency so while one may not want to invoke defrag algorithms synchronously during the page faults, it should be worth invoking defrag at least in khugepaged. However it's also possible to disable defrag in khugepaged by writing 0 or enable defrag in khugepaged by writing 1: echo 0 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag echo 1 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag You can also control how many pages khugepaged should scan at each pass: /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_to_scan and how many milliseconds to wait in khugepaged between each pass (you can set this to 0 to run khugepaged at 100% utilization of one core): /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/scan_sleep_millisecs and how many milliseconds to wait in khugepaged if there's an hugepage allocation failure to throttle the next allocation attempt. /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/alloc_sleep_millisecs The khugepaged progress can be seen in the number of pages collapsed: /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_collapsed for each pass: /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/full_scans max_ptes_none specifies how many extra small pages (that are not already mapped) can be allocated when collapsing a group of small pages into one large page. /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_none A higher value leads to use additional memory for programs. A lower value leads to gain less thp performance. Value of max_ptes_none can waste cpu time very little, you can ignore it. max_ptes_swap specifies how many pages can be brought in from swap when collapsing a group of pages into a transparent huge page. /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_swap A higher value can cause excessive swap IO and waste memory. A lower value can prevent THPs from being collapsed, resulting fewer pages being collapsed into THPs, and lower memory access performance. == Boot parameter == You can change the sysfs boot time defaults of Transparent Hugepage Support by passing the parameter "transparent_hugepage=always" or "transparent_hugepage=madvise" or "transparent_hugepage=never" (without "") to the kernel command line. == Hugepages in tmpfs/shmem == You can control hugepage allocation policy in tmpfs with mount option "huge=". It can have following values: - "always": Attempt to allocate huge pages every time we need a new page; - "never": Do not allocate huge pages; - "within_size": Only allocate huge page if it will be fully within i_size. Also respect fadvise()/madvise() hints; - "advise: Only allocate huge pages if requested with fadvise()/madvise(); The default policy is "never". "mount -o remount,huge= /mountpoint" works fine after mount: remounting huge=never will not attempt to break up huge pages at all, just stop more from being allocated. There's also sysfs knob to control hugepage allocation policy for internal shmem mount: /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/shmem_enabled. The mount is used for SysV SHM, memfds, shared anonymous mmaps (of /dev/zero or MAP_ANONYMOUS), GPU drivers' DRM objects, Ashmem. In addition to policies listed above, shmem_enabled allows two further values: - "deny": For use in emergencies, to force the huge option off from all mounts; - "force": Force the huge option on for all - very useful for testing; == Need of application restart == The transparent_hugepage/enabled values and tmpfs mount option only affect future behavior. So to make them effective you need to restart any application that could have been using hugepages. This also applies to the regions registered in khugepaged. == Monitoring usage == The number of anonymous transparent huge pages currently used by the system is available by reading the AnonHugePages field in /proc/meminfo. To identify what applications are using anonymous transparent huge pages, it is necessary to read /proc/PID/smaps and count the AnonHugePages fields for each mapping. The number of file transparent huge pages mapped to userspace is available by reading ShmemPmdMapped and ShmemHugePages fields in /proc/meminfo. To identify what applications are mapping file transparent huge pages, it is necessary to read /proc/PID/smaps and count the FileHugeMapped fields for each mapping. Note that reading the smaps file is expensive and reading it frequently will incur overhead. There are a number of counters in /proc/vmstat that may be used to monitor how successfully the system is providing huge pages for use. thp_fault_alloc is incremented every time a huge page is successfully allocated to handle a page fault. This applies to both the first time a page is faulted and for COW faults. thp_collapse_alloc is incremented by khugepaged when it has found a range of pages to collapse into one huge page and has successfully allocated a new huge page to store the data. thp_fault_fallback is incremented if a page fault fails to allocate a huge page and instead falls back to using small pages. thp_collapse_alloc_failed is incremented if khugepaged found a range of pages that should be collapsed into one huge page but failed the allocation. thp_file_alloc is incremented every time a file huge page is successfully allocated. thp_file_mapped is incremented every time a file huge page is mapped into user address space. thp_split_page is incremented every time a huge page is split into base pages. This can happen for a variety of reasons but a common reason is that a huge page is old and is being reclaimed. This action implies splitting all PMD the page mapped with. thp_split_page_failed is incremented if kernel fails to split huge page. This can happen if the page was pinned by somebody. thp_deferred_split_page is incremented when a huge page is put onto split queue. This happens when a huge page is partially unmapped and splitting it would free up some memory. Pages on split queue are going to be split under memory pressure. thp_split_pmd is incremented every time a PMD split into table of PTEs. This can happen, for instance, when application calls mprotect() or munmap() on part of huge page. It doesn't split huge page, only page table entry. thp_zero_page_alloc is incremented every time a huge zero page is successfully allocated. It includes allocations which where dropped due race with other allocation. Note, it doesn't count every map of the huge zero page, only its allocation. thp_zero_page_alloc_failed is incremented if kernel fails to allocate huge zero page and falls back to using small pages. As the system ages, allocating huge pages may be expensive as the system uses memory compaction to copy data around memory to free a huge page for use. There are some counters in /proc/vmstat to help monitor this overhead. compact_stall is incremented every time a process stalls to run memory compaction so that a huge page is free for use. compact_success is incremented if the system compacted memory and freed a huge page for use. compact_fail is incremented if the system tries to compact memory but failed. compact_pages_moved is incremented each time a page is moved. If this value is increasing rapidly, it implies that the system is copying a lot of data to satisfy the huge page allocation. It is possible that the cost of copying exceeds any savings from reduced TLB misses. compact_pagemigrate_failed is incremented when the underlying mechanism for moving a page failed. compact_blocks_moved is incremented each time memory compaction examines a huge page aligned range of pages. It is possible to establish how long the stalls were using the function tracer to record how long was spent in __alloc_pages_nodemask and using the mm_page_alloc tracepoint to identify which allocations were for huge pages. == get_user_pages and follow_page == get_user_pages and follow_page if run on a hugepage, will return the head or tail pages as usual (exactly as they would do on hugetlbfs). Most gup users will only care about the actual physical address of the page and its temporary pinning to release after the I/O is complete, so they won't ever notice the fact the page is huge. But if any driver is going to mangle over the page structure of the tail page (like for checking page->mapping or other bits that are relevant for the head page and not the tail page), it should be updated to jump to check head page instead. Taking reference on any head/tail page would prevent page from being split by anyone. NOTE: these aren't new constraints to the GUP API, and they match the same constrains that applies to hugetlbfs too, so any driver capable of handling GUP on hugetlbfs will also work fine on transparent hugepage backed mappings. In case you can't handle compound pages if they're returned by follow_page, the FOLL_SPLIT bit can be specified as parameter to follow_page, so that it will split the hugepages before returning them. Migration for example passes FOLL_SPLIT as parameter to follow_page because it's not hugepage aware and in fact it can't work at all on hugetlbfs (but it instead works fine on transparent hugepages thanks to FOLL_SPLIT). migration simply can't deal with hugepages being returned (as it's not only checking the pfn of the page and pinning it during the copy but it pretends to migrate the memory in regular page sizes and with regular pte/pmd mappings). == Optimizing the applications == To be guaranteed that the kernel will map a 2M page immediately in any memory region, the mmap region has to be hugepage naturally aligned. posix_memalign() can provide that guarantee. == Hugetlbfs == You can use hugetlbfs on a kernel that has transparent hugepage support enabled just fine as always. No difference can be noted in hugetlbfs other than there will be less overall fragmentation. All usual features belonging to hugetlbfs are preserved and unaffected. libhugetlbfs will also work fine as usual. == Graceful fallback == Code walking pagetables but unaware about huge pmds can simply call split_huge_pmd(vma, pmd, addr) where the pmd is the one returned by pmd_offset. It's trivial to make the code transparent hugepage aware by just grepping for "pmd_offset" and adding split_huge_pmd where missing after pmd_offset returns the pmd. Thanks to the graceful fallback design, with a one liner change, you can avoid to write hundred if not thousand of lines of complex code to make your code hugepage aware. If you're not walking pagetables but you run into a physical hugepage but you can't handle it natively in your code, you can split it by calling split_huge_page(page). This is what the Linux VM does before it tries to swapout the hugepage for example. split_huge_page() can fail if the page is pinned and you must handle this correctly. Example to make mremap.c transparent hugepage aware with a one liner change: diff --git a/mm/mremap.c b/mm/mremap.c --- a/mm/mremap.c +++ b/mm/mremap.c @@ -41,6 +41,7 @@ static pmd_t *get_old_pmd(struct mm_stru return NULL; pmd = pmd_offset(pud, addr); + split_huge_pmd(vma, pmd, addr); if (pmd_none_or_clear_bad(pmd)) return NULL; == Locking in hugepage aware code == We want as much code as possible hugepage aware, as calling split_huge_page() or split_huge_pmd() has a cost. To make pagetable walks huge pmd aware, all you need to do is to call pmd_trans_huge() on the pmd returned by pmd_offset. You must hold the mmap_sem in read (or write) mode to be sure an huge pmd cannot be created from under you by khugepaged (khugepaged collapse_huge_page takes the mmap_sem in write mode in addition to the anon_vma lock). If pmd_trans_huge returns false, you just fallback in the old code paths. If instead pmd_trans_huge returns true, you have to take the page table lock (pmd_lock()) and re-run pmd_trans_huge. Taking the page table lock will prevent the huge pmd to be converted into a regular pmd from under you (split_huge_pmd can run in parallel to the pagetable walk). If the second pmd_trans_huge returns false, you should just drop the page table lock and fallback to the old code as before. Otherwise you can proceed to process the huge pmd and the hugepage natively. Once finished you can drop the page table lock. == Refcounts and transparent huge pages == Refcounting on THP is mostly consistent with refcounting on other compound pages: - get_page()/put_page() and GUP operate in head page's ->_refcount. - ->_refcount in tail pages is always zero: get_page_unless_zero() never succeed on tail pages. - map/unmap of the pages with PTE entry increment/decrement ->_mapcount on relevant sub-page of the compound page. - map/unmap of the whole compound page accounted in compound_mapcount (stored in first tail page). For file huge pages, we also increment ->_mapcount of all sub-pages in order to have race-free detection of last unmap of subpages. PageDoubleMap() indicates that the page is *possibly* mapped with PTEs. For anonymous pages PageDoubleMap() also indicates ->_mapcount in all subpages is offset up by one. This additional reference is required to get race-free detection of unmap of subpages when we have them mapped with both PMDs and PTEs. This is optimization required to lower overhead of per-subpage mapcount tracking. The alternative is alter ->_mapcount in all subpages on each map/unmap of the whole compound page. For anonymous pages, we set PG_double_map when a PMD of the page got split for the first time, but still have PMD mapping. The additional references go away with last compound_mapcount. File pages get PG_double_map set on first map of the page with PTE and goes away when the page gets evicted from page cache. split_huge_page internally has to distribute the refcounts in the head page to the tail pages before clearing all PG_head/tail bits from the page structures. It can be done easily for refcounts taken by page table entries. But we don't have enough information on how to distribute any additional pins (i.e. from get_user_pages). split_huge_page() fails any requests to split pinned huge page: it expects page count to be equal to sum of mapcount of all sub-pages plus one (split_huge_page caller must have reference for head page). split_huge_page uses migration entries to stabilize page->_refcount and page->_mapcount of anonymous pages. File pages just got unmapped. We safe against physical memory scanners too: the only legitimate way scanner can get reference to a page is get_page_unless_zero(). All tail pages have zero ->_refcount until atomic_add(). This prevents the scanner from getting a reference to the tail page up to that point. After the atomic_add() we don't care about the ->_refcount value. We already known how many references should be uncharged from the head page. For head page get_page_unless_zero() will succeed and we don't mind. It's clear where reference should go after split: it will stay on head page. Note that split_huge_pmd() doesn't have any limitation on refcounting: pmd can be split at any point and never fails. == Partial unmap and deferred_split_huge_page() == Unmapping part of THP (with munmap() or other way) is not going to free memory immediately. Instead, we detect that a subpage of THP is not in use in page_remove_rmap() and queue the THP for splitting if memory pressure comes. Splitting will free up unused subpages. Splitting the page right away is not an option due to locking context in the place where we can detect partial unmap. It's also might be counterproductive since in many cases partial unmap happens during exit(2) if a THP crosses a VMA boundary. Function deferred_split_huge_page() is used to queue page for splitting. The splitting itself will happen when we get memory pressure via shrinker interface.