46bdb4277f
Commit 5c0a85fad949 ("mm: make faultaround produce old ptes") changed
the "faultaround" behaviour to initialise prefaulted PTEs as 'old',
since this avoids vmscan wrongly assuming that they are hot, despite
having never been explicitly accessed by userspace. The change has been
shown to benefit numerous arm64 micro-architectures (with hardware
access flag) running Android, where both application launch latency and
direct reclaim time are significantly reduced (by 10%+ and ~80%
respectively).
Unfortunately, commit 315d09bf30c2 ("Revert "mm: make faultaround
produce old ptes"") reverted the change due to it being identified as
the cause of a ~6% regression in unixbench on x86. Experiments on a
variety of recent arm64 micro-architectures indicate that unixbench is
not affected by the original commit, which appears to yield a 0-1%
performance improvement.
Since one size does not fit all for the initial state of prefaulted
PTEs, introduce arch_wants_old_prefaulted_pte(), which allows an
architecture to opt-in to 'old' prefaulted PTEs at runtime based on
whatever criteria it may have.
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Reported-by: Vinayak Menon <vinmenon@codeaurora.org>
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.