KSM page migration is already supported in the case of memory hotremove,
which takes the ksm_thread_mutex across all its migrations to keep life
simple.
But the new KSM NUMA merge_across_nodes knob introduces a problem, when
it's set to non-default 0: if a KSM page is migrated to a different NUMA
node, how do we migrate its stable node to the right tree? And what if
that collides with an existing stable node?
So far there's no provision for that, and this patch does not attempt to
deal with it either. But how will I test a solution, when I don't know
how to hotremove memory? The best answer is to enable KSM page migration
in all cases now, and test more common cases. With THP and compaction
added since KSM came in, page migration is now mainstream, and it's a
shame that a KSM page can frustrate freeing a page block.
Without worrying about merge_across_nodes 0 for now, this patch gets KSM
page migration working reliably for default merge_across_nodes 1 (but
leave the patch enabling it until near the end of the series).
It's much simpler than I'd originally imagined, and does not require an
additional tier of locking: page migration relies on the page lock, KSM
page reclaim relies on the page lock, the page lock is enough for KSM page
migration too.
Almost all the care has to be in get_ksm_page(): that's the function which
worries about when a stable node is stale and should be freed, now it also
has to worry about the KSM page being migrated.
The only new overhead is an additional put/get/lock/unlock_page when
stable_tree_search() arrives at a matching node: to make sure migration
respects the raised page count, and so does not migrate the page while
we're busy with it here. That's probably avoidable, either by changing
internal interfaces from using kpage to stable_node, or by moving the
ksm_migrate_page() callsite into a page_freeze_refs() section (even if not
swapcache); but this works well, I've no urge to pull it apart now.
(Descents of the stable tree may pass through nodes whose KSM pages are
under migration: being unlocked, the raised page count does not prevent
that, nor need it: it's safe to memcmp against either old or new page.)
You might worry about mremap, and whether page migration's rmap_walk to
remove migration entries will find all the KSM locations where it inserted
earlier: that should already be handled, by the satisfyingly heavy hammer
of move_vma()'s call to ksm_madvise(,,,MADV_UNMERGEABLE,).
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Petr Holasek <pholasek@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Izik Eidus <izik.eidus@ravellosystems.com> Cc: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@de.ibm.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
projects / ~andy / linux / commit