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KVM: x86/mmu: Split huge pages mapped by the TDP MMU on fault
Now that the TDP MMU has a mechanism to split huge pages, use it in the
fault path when a huge page needs to be replaced with a mapping at a
lower level.
This change reduces the negative performance impact of NX HugePages.
Prior to this change if a vCPU executed from a huge page and NX
HugePages was enabled, the vCPU would take a fault, zap the huge page,
and mapping the faulting address at 4KiB with execute permissions
enabled. The rest of the memory would be left *unmapped* and have to be
faulted back in by the guest upon access (read, write, or execute). If
guest is backed by 1GiB, a single execute instruction can zap an entire
GiB of its physical address space.
For example, it can take a VM longer to execute from its memory than to
populate that memory in the first place:
$ ./execute_perf_test -s anonymous_hugetlb_1gb -v96
Populating memory : 2.748378795s
Executing from memory : 2.899670885s
With this change, such faults split the huge page instead of zapping it,
which avoids the non-present faults on the rest of the huge page:
$ ./execute_perf_test -s anonymous_hugetlb_1gb -v96
Populating memory : 2.729544474s
Executing from memory : 0.111965688s <---
This change also reduces the performance impact of dirty logging when
eager_page_split=N. eager_page_split=N (abbreviated "eps=N" below) can
be desirable for read-heavy workloads, as it avoids allocating memory to
split huge pages that are never written and avoids increasing the TLB
miss cost on reads of those pages.
| Config: ept=Y, tdp_mmu=Y, 5% writes |
| Iteration 1 dirty memory time |
| --------------------------------------------- |
vCPU Count | eps=N (Before) | eps=N (After) | eps=Y |
------------ | -------------- | ------------- | ------------ |
2 | 0.332305091s | 0.019615027s | 0.006108211s |
4 | 0.353096020s | 0.019452131s | 0.006214670s |
8 | 0.453938562s | 0.019748246s | 0.006610997s |
16 | 0.719095024s | 0.019972171s | 0.007757889s |
32 | 1.698727124s | 0.021361615s | 0.012274432s |
64 | 2.630673582s | 0.031122014s | 0.016994683s |
96 | 3.016535213s | 0.062608739s | 0.044760838s |
Eager page splitting remains beneficial for write-heavy workloads, but
the gap is now reduced.
| Config: ept=Y, tdp_mmu=Y, 100% writes |
| Iteration 1 dirty memory time |
| --------------------------------------------- |
vCPU Count | eps=N (Before) | eps=N (After) | eps=Y |
------------ | -------------- | ------------- | ------------ |
2 | 0.317710329s | 0.296204596s | 0.058689782s |
4 | 0.337102375s | 0.299841017s | 0.060343076s |
8 | 0.386025681s | 0.297274460s | 0.060399702s |
16 | 0.791462524s | 0.298942578s | 0.062508699s |
32 | 1.719646014s | 0.313101996s | 0.075984855s |
64 | 2.527973150s | 0.455779206s | 0.079789363s |
96 | 2.681123208s | 0.673778787s | 0.165386739s |
Further study is needed to determine if the remaining gap is acceptable
for customer workloads or if eager_page_split=N still requires a-priori
knowledge of the VM workload, especially when considering these costs
extrapolated out to large VMs with e.g. 416 vCPUs and 12TB RAM.
Signed-off-by: David Matlack <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Mingwei Zhang <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <[email protected]>
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