Linux doesn't have an ability to free pages lazy while other OS already
have been supported that named by madvise(MADV_FREE).

The gain is clear that kernel can discard freed pages rather than
swapping out or OOM if memory pressure happens.

Without memory pressure, freed pages would be reused by userspace
without another additional overhead(ex, page fault + allocation +
zeroing).

Jason Evans said:

: Facebook has been using MAP_UNINITIALIZED
: (https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/18/308) in some of its applications for
: several years, but there are operational costs to maintaining this
: out-of-tree in our kernel and in jemalloc, and we are anxious to retire it
: in favor of MADV_FREE.  When we first enabled MAP_UNINITIALIZED it
: increased throughput for much of our workload by ~5%, and although the
: benefit has decreased using newer hardware and kernels, there is still
: enough benefit that we cannot reasonably retire it without a replacement.
:
: Aside from Facebook operations, there are numerous broadly used
: applications that would benefit from MADV_FREE.  The ones that immediately
: come to mind are redis, varnish, and MariaDB.  I don't have much insight
: into Android internals and development process, but I would hope to see
: MADV_FREE support eventually end up there as well to benefit applications
: linked with the integrated jemalloc.
:
: jemalloc will use MADV_FREE once it becomes available in the Linux kernel.
: In fact, jemalloc already uses MADV_FREE or equivalent everywhere it's
: available: *BSD, OS X, Windows, and Solaris -- every platform except Linux
: (and AIX, but I'm not sure it even compiles on AIX).  The lack of
: MADV_FREE on Linux forced me down a long series of increasingly
: sophisticated heuristics for madvise() volume reduction, and even so this
: remains a common performance issue for people using jemalloc on Linux.
: Please integrate MADV_FREE; many people will benefit substantially.

How it works:

When madvise syscall is called, VM clears dirty bit of ptes of the
range.  If memory pressure happens, VM checks dirty bit of page table
and if it found still "clean", it means it's a "lazyfree pages" so VM
could discard the page instead of swapping out.  Once there was store
operation for the page before VM peek a page to reclaim, dirty bit is
set so VM can swap out the page instead of discarding.

One thing we should notice is that basically, MADV_FREE relies on dirty
bit in page table entry to decide whether VM allows to discard the page
or not.  IOW, if page table entry includes marked dirty bit, VM
shouldn't discard the page.

However, as a example, if swap-in by read fault happens, page table
entry doesn't have dirty bit so MADV_FREE could discard the page
wrongly.

For avoiding the problem, MADV_FREE did more checks with PageDirty and
PageSwapCache.  It worked out because swapped-in page lives on swap
cache and since it is evicted from the swap cache, the page has PG_dirty
flag.  So both page flags check effectively prevent wrong discarding by
MADV_FREE.

However, a problem in above logic is that swapped-in page has PG_dirty
still after they are removed from swap cache so VM cannot consider the
page as freeable any more even if madvise_free is called in future.

Look at below example for detail.

    ptr = malloc();
    memset(ptr);
    ..
    ..
    .. heavy memory pressure so all of pages are swapped out
    ..
    ..
    var = *ptr; -> a page swapped-in and could be removed from
                   swapcache. Then, page table doesn't mark
                   dirty bit and page descriptor includes PG_dirty
    ..
    ..
    madvise_free(ptr); -> It doesn't clear PG_dirty of the page.
    ..
    ..
    ..
    .. heavy memory pressure again.
    .. In this time, VM cannot discard the page because the page
    .. has *PG_dirty*

To solve the problem, this patch clears PG_dirty if only the page is
owned exclusively by current process when madvise is called because
PG_dirty represents ptes's dirtiness in several processes so we could
clear it only if we own it exclusively.

Firstly, heavy users would be general allocators(ex, jemalloc, tcmalloc
and hope glibc supports it) and jemalloc/tcmalloc already have supported
the feature for other OS(ex, FreeBSD)

  barrios@blaptop:~/benchmark/ebizzy$ lscpu
  Architecture:          x86_64
  CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
  Byte Order:            Little Endian
  CPU(s):                12
  On-line CPU(s) list:   0-11
  Thread(s) per core:    1
  Core(s) per socket:    1
  Socket(s):             12
  NUMA node(s):          1
  Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
  CPU family:            6
  Model:                 2
  Stepping:              3
  CPU MHz:               3200.185
  BogoMIPS:              6400.53
  Virtualization:        VT-x
  Hypervisor vendor:     KVM
  Virtualization type:   full
  L1d cache:             32K
  L1i cache:             32K
  L2 cache:              4096K
  NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-11
  ebizzy benchmark(./ebizzy -S 10 -n 512)

  Higher avg is better.

   vanilla-jemalloc             MADV_free-jemalloc

  1 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:   2961.90                avg:  12069.70
  std:     71.96(2.43%)         std:    186.68(1.55%)
  max:   3070.00                max:  12385.00
  min:   2796.00                min:  11746.00

  2 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:   5020.00                avg:  17827.00
  std:    264.87(5.28%)         std:    358.52(2.01%)
  max:   5244.00                max:  18760.00
  min:   4251.00                min:  17382.00

  4 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:   8988.80                avg:  27930.80
  std:   1175.33(13.08%)        std:   3317.33(11.88%)
  max:   9508.00                max:  30879.00
  min:   5477.00                min:  21024.00

  8 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:  13036.50                avg:  33739.40
  std:    170.67(1.31%)         std:   5146.22(15.25%)
  max:  13371.00                max:  40572.00
  min:  12785.00                min:  24088.00

  16 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:  11092.40                avg:  31424.20
  std:    710.60(6.41%)         std:   3763.89(11.98%)
  max:  12446.00                max:  36635.00
  min:   9949.00                min:  25669.00

  32 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:  11067.00                avg:  34495.80
  std:    971.06(8.77%)         std:   2721.36(7.89%)
  max:  12010.00                max:  38598.00
  min:   9002.00                min:  30636.00

In summary, MADV_FREE is about much faster than MADV_DONTNEED.

This patch (of 12):

Add core MADV_FREE implementation.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: small cleanups]
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Mika Penttil <mika.penttila@nextfour.com>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Jason Evans <je@fb.com>
Cc: Daniel Micay <danielmicay@gmail.com>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: <yalin.wang2010@gmail.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: "James E.J. Bottomley" <jejb@parisc-linux.org>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: "Shaohua Li" <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Cc: Chen Gang <gang.chen.5i5j@gmail.com>
Cc: Chris Zankel <chris@zankel.net>
Cc: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Cc: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru>
Cc: Matt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com>
Cc: Max Filippov <jcmvbkbc@gmail.com>
Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Cc: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
Cc: Roland Dreier <roland@kernel.org>
Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>