change_pte_range is called from task work context to mark PTEs for
receiving NUMA faulting hints.  If the marked pages are dirty then
migration may fail.  Some filesystems cannot migrate dirty pages without
blocking so are skipped in MIGRATE_ASYNC mode which just wastes CPU.
Even when they can, it can be a waste of cycles when the pages are
shared forcing higher scan rates.  This patch avoids marking shared
dirty pages for hinting faults but also will skip a migration if the
page was dirtied after the scanner updated a clean page.

This is most noticeable running the NASA Parallel Benchmark when backed
by btrfs, the default root filesystem for some distributions, but also
noticeable when using XFS.

The following are results from a 4-socket machine running a 4.16-rc4
kernel with some scheduler patches that are pending for the next merge
window.

                        4.16.0-rc4             4.16.0-rc4
                 schedtip-20180309          nodirty-v1
  Time cg.D      459.07 (   0.00%)      444.21 (   3.24%)
  Time ep.D       76.96 (   0.00%)       77.69 (  -0.95%)
  Time is.D       25.55 (   0.00%)       27.85 (  -9.00%)
  Time lu.D      601.58 (   0.00%)      596.87 (   0.78%)
  Time mg.D      107.73 (   0.00%)      108.22 (  -0.45%)

is.D regresses slightly in terms of absolute time but note that that
particular load varies quite a bit from run to run.  The more relevant
observation is the total system CPU usage.

            4.16.0-rc4  4.16.0-rc4
          schedtip-20180309 nodirty-v1
  User        71471.91    70627.04
  System      11078.96     8256.13
  Elapsed       661.66      632.74

That is a substantial drop in system CPU usage and overall the workload
completes faster.  The NUMA balancing statistics are also interesting

  NUMA base PTE updates        111407972   139848884
  NUMA huge PMD updates           206506      264869
  NUMA page range updates      217139044   275461812
  NUMA hint faults               4300924     3719784
  NUMA hint local faults         3012539     3416618
  NUMA hint local percent             70          91
  NUMA pages migrated            1517487     1358420

While more PTEs are scanned due to changes in what faults are gathered,
it's clear that a far higher percentage of faults are local as the bulk
of the remote hits were dirty pages that, in this case with btrfs, had
no chance of migrating.

The following is a comparison when using XFS as that is a more realistic
filesystem choice for a data partition

                        4.16.0-rc4             4.16.0-rc4
                 schedtip-20180309          nodirty-v1r47
  Time cg.D      485.28 (   0.00%)      442.62 (   8.79%)
  Time ep.D       77.68 (   0.00%)       77.54 (   0.18%)
  Time is.D       26.44 (   0.00%)       24.79 (   6.24%)
  Time lu.D      597.46 (   0.00%)      597.11 (   0.06%)
  Time mg.D      142.65 (   0.00%)      105.83 (  25.81%)

That is a reasonable gain on two relatively long-lived workloads.  While
not presented, there is also a substantial drop in system CPu usage and
the NUMA balancing stats show similar improvements in locality as btrfs
did.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180326094334.zserdec62gwmmfqf@techsingularity.net


Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>