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Commit 2ca25fa3 authored by Ryan Roberts's avatar Ryan Roberts
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mm: thp: Support allocation of anonymous multi-size THP



Introduce the logic to allow THP to be configured (through the new sysfs
interface we just added) to allocate large folios to back anonymous
memory, which are larger than the base page size but smaller than
PMD-size. We call this new THP extension "multi-size THP" (mTHP).

mTHP continues to be PTE-mapped, but in many cases can still provide
similar benefits to traditional PMD-sized THP: Page faults are
significantly reduced (by a factor of e.g. 4, 8, 16, etc. depending on
the configured order), but latency spikes are much less prominent
because the size of each page isn't as huge as the PMD-sized variant and
there is less memory to clear in each page fault. The number of per-page
operations (e.g. ref counting, rmap management, lru list management) are
also significantly reduced since those ops now become per-folio.

Some architectures also employ TLB compression mechanisms to squeeze
more entries in when a set of PTEs are virtually and physically
contiguous and approporiately aligned. In this case, TLB misses will
occur less often.

The new behaviour is disabled by default, but can be enabled at runtime
by writing to /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/hugepage-XXkb/enabled
(see documentation in previous commit). The long term aim is to change
the default to include suitable lower orders, but there are some risks
around internal fragmentation that need to be better understood first.

Tested-by: default avatarKefeng Wang <wangkefeng.wang@huawei.com>
Tested-by: default avatarJohn Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Ryan Roberts's avatarRyan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com>
parent 206974c1
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