On big systems, the mm refcount can become highly contented when doing a
lot of context switching with threaded applications. user<->idle switch
is one of the important cases. Abandoning lazy tlb entirely slows this
switching down quite a bit in the common uncontended case, so that is not
viable.
Implement a scheme where lazy tlb mm references do not contribute to the
refcount, instead they get explicitly removed when the refcount reaches
zero.
The final mmdrop() sends IPIs to all CPUs in the mm_cpumask and they
switch away from this mm to init_mm if it was being used as the lazy tlb
mm. Enabling the shoot lazies option therefore requires that the arch
ensures that mm_cpumask contains all CPUs that could possibly be using mm.
A DEBUG_VM option IPIs every CPU in the system after this to ensure there
are no references remaining before the mm is freed.
Shootdown IPIs cost could be an issue, but they have not been observed to
be a serious problem with this scheme, because short-lived processes tend
not to migrate CPUs much, therefore they don't get much chance to leave
lazy tlb mm references on remote CPUs. There are a lot of options to
reduce them if necessary, described in comments.
The near-worst-case can be benchmarked with will-it-scale:
context_switch1_threads -t $(($(nproc) / 2))
This will create nproc threads (nproc / 2 switching pairs) all sharing the
same mm that spread over all CPUs so each CPU does thread->idle->thread
switching.
[ Rik came up with basically the same idea a few years ago, so credit
to him for that. ]
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20230118080011.2258375-1-npiggin@gmail.com/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20180728215357.3249-11-riel@surriel.com/
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20230203071837.1136453-5-npiggin@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Cc: Christophe Leroy <christophe.leroy@csgroup.eu>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Cc: Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
2655421ae6