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Patch series "mm / virtio: Provide support for free page reporting", v17.
This series provides an asynchronous means of reporting free guest pages
to a hypervisor so that the memory associated with those pages can be
dropped and reused by other processes and/or guests on the host. Using
this it is possible to avoid unnecessary I/O to disk and greatly improve
performance in the case of memory overcommit on the host.
When enabled we will be performing a scan of free memory every 2 seconds
while pages of sufficiently high order are being freed. In each pass at
least one sixteenth of each free list will be reported. By doing this we
avoid racing against other threads that may be causing a high amount of
memory churn.
The lowest page order currently scanned when reporting pages is
pageblock_order so that this feature will not interfere with the use of
Transparent Huge Pages in the case of virtualization.
Currently this is only in use by virtio-balloon however there is the hope
that at some point in the future other hypervisors might be able to make
use of it. In the virtio-balloon/QEMU implementation the hypervisor is
currently using MADV_DONTNEED to indicate to the host kernel that the page
is currently free. It will be zeroed and faulted back into the guest the
next time the page is accessed.
To track if a page is reported or not the Uptodate flag was repurposed and
used as a Reported flag for Buddy pages. We walk though the free list
isolating pages and adding them to the scatterlist until we either
encounter the end of the list or have processed at least one sixteenth of
the pages that were listed in nr_free prior to us starting. If we fill
the scatterlist before we reach the end of the list we rotate the list so
that the first unreported page we encounter is moved to the head of the
list as that is where we will resume after we have freed the reported
pages back into the tail of the list.
Below are the results from various benchmarks. I primarily focused on two
tests. The first is the will-it-scale/page_fault2 test, and the other is
a modified version of will-it-scale/page_fault1 that was enabled to use
THP. I did this as it allows for better visibility into different parts
of the memory subsystem. The guest is running with 32G for RAM on one
node of a E5-2630 v3. The host has had some features such as CPU turbo
disabled in the BIOS.
Test page_fault1 (THP) page_fault2
Name tasks Process Iter STDEV Process Iter STDEV
Baseline 1 1012402.50 0.14% 361855.25 0.81%
16 8827457.25 0.09% 3282347.00 0.34%
Patches Applied 1 1007897.00 0.23% 361887.00 0.26%
16 8784741.75 0.39% 3240669.25 0.48%
Patches Enabled 1 1010227.50 0.39% 359749.25 0.56%
16 8756219.00 0.24% 3226608.75 0.97%
Patches Enabled 1 1050982.00 4.26% 357966.25 0.14%
page shuffle 16 8672601.25 0.49% 3223177.75 0.40%
Patches enabled 1 1003238.00 0.22% 360211.00 0.22%
shuffle w/ RFC 16 8767010.50 0.32% 3199874.00 0.71%
The results above are for a baseline with a linux-next-20191219 kernel,
that kernel with this patch set applied but page reporting disabled in
virtio-balloon, the patches applied and page reporting fully enabled, the
patches enabled with page shuffling enabled, and the patches applied with
page shuffling enabled and an RFC patch that makes used of MADV_FREE in
QEMU. These results include the deviation seen between the average value
reported here versus the high and/or low value. I observed that during
the test memory usage for the first three tests never dropped whereas with
the patches fully enabled the VM would drop to using only a few GB of the
host's memory when switching from memhog to page fault tests.
Any of the overhead visible with this patch set enabled seems due to page
faults caused by accessing the reported pages and the host zeroing the
page before giving it back to the guest. This overhead is much more
visible when using THP than with standard 4K pages. In addition page
shuffling seemed to increase the amount of faults generated due to an
increase in memory churn. The overehad is reduced when using MADV_FREE as
we can avoid the extra zeroing of the pages when they are reintroduced to
the host, as can be seen when the RFC is applied with shuffling enabled.
The overall guest size is kept fairly small to only a few GB while the
test is running. If the host memory were oversubscribed this patch set
should result in a performance improvement as swapping memory in the host
can be avoided.
A brief history on the background of free page reporting can be found at:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/29f43d5796feed0dec8e8bb98b187d9dac03b900.camel@linux.intel.com/
This patch (of 9):
Move the head/tail adding logic out of the shuffle code and into the
__free_one_page function since ultimately that is where it is really
needed anyway. By doing this we should be able to reduce the overhead and
can consolidate all of the list addition bits in one spot.
Signed-off-by: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Cc: Yang Zhang <yang.zhang.wz@gmail.com>
Cc: Pankaj Gupta <pagupta@redhat.com>
Cc: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Cc: Nitesh Narayan Lal <nitesh@redhat.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: Wei Wang <wei.w.wang@intel.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@suse.de>
Cc: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Cc: wei qi <weiqi4@huawei.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200211224602.29318.84523.stgit@localhost.localdomain
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Patch series "mm: Randomize free memory", v10.
This patch (of 3):
Randomization of the page allocator improves the average utilization of
a direct-mapped memory-side-cache. Memory side caching is a platform
capability that Linux has been previously exposed to in HPC
(high-performance computing) environments on specialty platforms. In
that instance it was a smaller pool of high-bandwidth-memory relative to
higher-capacity / lower-bandwidth DRAM. Now, this capability is going
to be found on general purpose server platforms where DRAM is a cache in
front of higher latency persistent memory [1].
Robert offered an explanation of the state of the art of Linux
interactions with memory-side-caches [2], and I copy it here:
It's been a problem in the HPC space:
http://www.nersc.gov/research-and-development/knl-cache-mode-performance-coe/
A kernel module called zonesort is available to try to help:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/xeon-phi-software
and this abandoned patch series proposed that for the kernel:
https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170823100205.17311-1-lukasz.daniluk@intel.com
Dan's patch series doesn't attempt to ensure buffers won't conflict, but
also reduces the chance that the buffers will. This will make performance
more consistent, albeit slower than "optimal" (which is near impossible
to attain in a general-purpose kernel). That's better than forcing
users to deploy remedies like:
"To eliminate this gradual degradation, we have added a Stream
measurement to the Node Health Check that follows each job;
nodes are rebooted whenever their measured memory bandwidth
falls below 300 GB/s."
A replacement for zonesort was merged upstream in commit cc9aec03e58f
("x86/numa_emulation: Introduce uniform split capability"). With this
numa_emulation capability, memory can be split into cache sized
("near-memory" sized) numa nodes. A bind operation to such a node, and
disabling workloads on other nodes, enables full cache performance.
However, once the workload exceeds the cache size then cache conflicts
are unavoidable. While HPC environments might be able to tolerate
time-scheduling of cache sized workloads, for general purpose server
platforms, the oversubscribed cache case will be the common case.
The worst case scenario is that a server system owner benchmarks a
workload at boot with an un-contended cache only to see that performance
degrade over time, even below the average cache performance due to
excessive conflicts. Randomization clips the peaks and fills in the
valleys of cache utilization to yield steady average performance.
Here are some performance impact details of the patches:
1/ An Intel internal synthetic memory bandwidth measurement tool, saw a
3X speedup in a contrived case that tries to force cache conflicts.
The contrived cased used the numa_emulation capability to force an
instance of the benchmark to be run in two of the near-memory sized
numa nodes. If both instances were placed on the same emulated they
would fit and cause zero conflicts. While on separate emulated nodes
without randomization they underutilized the cache and conflicted
unnecessarily due to the in-order allocation per node.
2/ A well known Java server application benchmark was run with a heap
size that exceeded cache size by 3X. The cache conflict rate was 8%
for the first run and degraded to 21% after page allocator aging. With
randomization enabled the rate levelled out at 11%.
3/ A MongoDB workload did not observe measurable difference in
cache-conflict rates, but the overall throughput dropped by 7% with
randomization in one case.
4/ Mel Gorman ran his suite of performance workloads with randomization
enabled on platforms without a memory-side-cache and saw a mix of some
improvements and some losses [3].
While there is potentially significant improvement for applications that
depend on low latency access across a wide working-set, the performance
may be negligible to negative for other workloads. For this reason the
shuffle capability defaults to off unless a direct-mapped
memory-side-cache is detected. Even then, the page_alloc.shuffle=0
parameter can be specified to disable the randomization on those systems.
Outside of memory-side-cache utilization concerns there is potentially
security benefit from randomization. Some data exfiltration and
return-oriented-programming attacks rely on the ability to infer the
location of sensitive data objects. The kernel page allocator, especially
early in system boot, has predictable first-in-first out behavior for
physical pages. Pages are freed in physical address order when first
onlined.
Quoting Kees:
"While we already have a base-address randomization
(CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_MEMORY), attacks against the same hardware and
memory layouts would certainly be using the predictability of
allocation ordering (i.e. for attacks where the base address isn't
important: only the relative positions between allocated memory).
This is common in lots of heap-style attacks. They try to gain
control over ordering by spraying allocations, etc.
I'd really like to see this because it gives us something similar
to CONFIG_SLAB_FREELIST_RANDOM but for the page allocator."
While SLAB_FREELIST_RANDOM reduces the predictability of some local slab
caches it leaves vast bulk of memory to be predictably in order allocated.
However, it should be noted, the concrete security benefits are hard to
quantify, and no known CVE is mitigated by this randomization.
Introduce shuffle_free_memory(), and its helper shuffle_zone(), to perform
a Fisher-Yates shuffle of the page allocator 'free_area' lists when they
are initially populated with free memory at boot and at hotplug time. Do
this based on either the presence of a page_alloc.shuffle=Y command line
parameter, or autodetection of a memory-side-cache (to be added in a
follow-on patch).
The shuffling is done in terms of CONFIG_SHUFFLE_PAGE_ORDER sized free
pages where the default CONFIG_SHUFFLE_PAGE_ORDER is MAX_ORDER-1 i.e. 10,
4MB this trades off randomization granularity for time spent shuffling.
MAX_ORDER-1 was chosen to be minimally invasive to the page allocator
while still showing memory-side cache behavior improvements, and the
expectation that the security implications of finer granularity
randomization is mitigated by CONFIG_SLAB_FREELIST_RANDOM. The
performance impact of the shuffling appears to be in the noise compared to
other memory initialization work.
This initial randomization can be undone over time so a follow-on patch is
introduced to inject entropy on page free decisions. It is reasonable to
ask if the page free entropy is sufficient, but it is not enough due to
the in-order initial freeing of pages. At the start of that process
putting page1 in front or behind page0 still keeps them close together,
page2 is still near page1 and has a high chance of being adjacent. As
more pages are added ordering diversity improves, but there is still high
page locality for the low address pages and this leads to no significant
impact to the cache conflict rate.
[1]: https://itpeernetwork.intel.com/intel-optane-dc-persistent-memory-operating-modes/
[2]: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/AT5PR8401MB1169D656C8B5E121752FC0F8AB120@AT5PR8401MB1169.NAMPRD84.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM
[3]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/10/12/309
[dan.j.williams@intel.com: fix shuffle enable]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/154943713038.3858443.4125180191382062871.stgit@dwillia2-desk3.amr.corp.intel.com
[cai@lca.pw: fix SHUFFLE_PAGE_ALLOCATOR help texts]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190425201300.75650-1-cai@lca.pw
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/154899811738.3165233.12325692939590944259.stgit@dwillia2-desk3.amr.corp.intel.com
Signed-off-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Keith Busch <keith.busch@intel.com>
Cc: Robert Elliott <elliott@hpe.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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