We must add hugetlb_free_vmemmap=on (or "off") to the boot cmdline and
reboot the server to enable or disable the feature of optimizing vmemmap
pages associated with HugeTLB pages. However, rebooting usually takes a
long time. So add a sysctl to enable or disable the feature at runtime
without rebooting. Why we need this? There are 3 use cases.
1) The feature of minimizing overhead of struct page associated with
each HugeTLB is disabled by default without passing
"hugetlb_free_vmemmap=on" to the boot cmdline. When we (ByteDance)
deliver the servers to the users who want to enable this feature, they
have to configure the grub (change boot cmdline) and reboot the
servers, whereas rebooting usually takes a long time (we have thousands
of servers). It's a very bad experience for the users. So we need a
approach to enable this feature after rebooting. This is a use case in
our practical environment.
2) Some use cases are that HugeTLB pages are allocated 'on the fly'
instead of being pulled from the HugeTLB pool, those workloads would be
affected with this feature enabled. Those workloads could be
identified by the characteristics of they never explicitly allocating
huge pages with 'nr_hugepages' but only set 'nr_overcommit_hugepages'
and then let the pages be allocated from the buddy allocator at fault
time. We can confirm it is a real use case from the commit
099730d674. For those workloads, the page fault time could be ~2x
slower than before. We suspect those users want to disable this
feature if the system has enabled this before and they don't think the
memory savings benefit is enough to make up for the performance drop.
3) If the workload which wants vmemmap pages to be optimized and the
workload which wants to set 'nr_overcommit_hugepages' and does not want
the extera overhead at fault time when the overcommitted pages be
allocated from the buddy allocator are deployed in the same server.
The user could enable this feature and set 'nr_hugepages' and
'nr_overcommit_hugepages', then disable the feature. In this case, the
overcommited HugeTLB pages will not encounter the extra overhead at
fault time.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220512041142.39501-5-songmuchun@bytedance.com
Signed-off-by: Muchun Song <songmuchun@bytedance.com>
Reviewed-by: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Iurii Zaikin <yzaikin@google.com>
Cc: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@suse.de>
Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Cc: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
Cc: Xiongchun Duan <duanxiongchun@bytedance.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
78f39084b4