summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/Documentation/admin-guide
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorUsama Arif <usamaarif642@gmail.com>2024-08-30 11:03:39 +0100
committerAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>2024-09-09 16:39:04 -0700
commitdafff3f4c850c98e15501bc6ee20581f9a013dcc (patch)
tree1b28424445a2a5e528a0a2f8640ddf637eb67328 /Documentation/admin-guide
parent8422acdc97ed5839692b45f800dbfb78abe65a94 (diff)
mm: split underused THPs
This is an attempt to mitigate the issue of running out of memory when THP is always enabled. During runtime whenever a THP is being faulted in (__do_huge_pmd_anonymous_page) or collapsed by khugepaged (collapse_huge_page), the THP is added to _deferred_list. Whenever memory reclaim happens in linux, the kernel runs the deferred_split shrinker which goes through the _deferred_list. If the folio was partially mapped, the shrinker attempts to split it. If the folio is not partially mapped, the shrinker checks if the THP was underused, i.e. how many of the base 4K pages of the entire THP were zero-filled. If this number goes above a certain threshold (decided by /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_none), the shrinker will attempt to split that THP. Then at remap time, the pages that were zero-filled are mapped to the shared zeropage, hence saving memory. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240830100438.3623486-6-usamaarif642@gmail.com Signed-off-by: Usama Arif <usamaarif642@gmail.com> Suggested-by: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com> Co-authored-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Alexander Zhu <alexlzhu@fb.com> Cc: Barry Song <baohua@kernel.org> Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> Cc: Domenico Cerasuolo <cerasuolodomenico@gmail.com> Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> Cc: Kairui Song <ryncsn@gmail.com> Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> Cc: Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org> Cc: Nico Pache <npache@redhat.com> Cc: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev> Cc: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com> Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev> Cc: Shuang Zhai <zhais@google.com> Cc: Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com> Cc: Shuang Zhai <szhai2@cs.rochester.edu> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/admin-guide')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst6
1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
index 56a086900651..aca0cff852b8 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
@@ -471,6 +471,12 @@ thp_deferred_split_page
splitting it would free up some memory. Pages on split queue are
going to be split under memory pressure.
+thp_underused_split_page
+ is incremented when a huge page on the split queue was split
+ because it was underused. A THP is underused if the number of
+ zero pages in the THP is above a certain threshold
+ (/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_none).
+
thp_split_pmd
is incremented every time a PMD split into table of PTEs.
This can happen, for instance, when application calls mprotect() or