memory tiering: hot page selection with hint page fault latency

memory tiering: hot page selection with hint page fault latency

Patch series "memory tiering: hot page selection", v4.

To optimize page placement in a memory tiering system with NUMA balancing,
the hot pages in the slow memory nodes need to be identified.
Essentially, the original NUMA balancing implementation selects the mostly
recently accessed (MRU) pages to promote.  But this isn't a perfect
algorithm to identify the hot pages.  Because the pages with quite low
access frequency may be accessed eventually given the NUMA balancing page
table scanning period could be quite long (e.g.  60 seconds).  So in this
patchset, we implement a new hot page identification algorithm based on
the latency between NUMA balancing page table scanning and hint page
fault.  Which is a kind of mostly frequently accessed (MFU) algorithm.

In NUMA balancing memory tiering mode, if there are hot pages in slow
memory node and cold pages in fast memory node, we need to promote/demote
hot/cold pages between the fast and cold memory nodes.

A choice is to promote/demote as fast as possible.  But the CPU cycles and
memory bandwidth consumed by the high promoting/demoting throughput will
hurt the latency of some workload because of accessing inflating and slow
memory bandwidth contention.

A way to resolve this issue is to restrict the max promoting/demoting
throughput.  It will take longer to finish the promoting/demoting.  But
the workload latency will be better.  This is implemented in this patchset
as the page promotion rate limit mechanism.

The promotion hot threshold is workload and system configuration
dependent.  So in this patchset, a method to adjust the hot threshold
automatically is implemented.  The basic idea is to control the number of
the candidate promotion pages to match the promotion rate limit.

We used the pmbench memory accessing benchmark tested the patchset on a
2-socket server system with DRAM and PMEM installed.  The test results are
as follows,

		pmbench score		promote rate
		 (accesses/s)			MB/s
		-------------		------------
base		  146887704.1		       725.6
hot selection     165695601.2		       544.0
rate limit	  162814569.8		       165.2
auto adjustment	  170495294.0                  136.9

From the results above,

With hot page selection patch [1/3], the pmbench score increases about
12.8%, and promote rate (overhead) decreases about 25.0%, compared with
base kernel.

With rate limit patch [2/3], pmbench score decreases about 1.7%, and
promote rate decreases about 69.6%, compared with hot page selection
patch.

With threshold auto adjustment patch [3/3], pmbench score increases about
4.7%, and promote rate decrease about 17.1%, compared with rate limit
patch.

Baolin helped to test the patchset with MySQL on a machine which contains
1 DRAM node (30G) and 1 PMEM node (126G).

sysbench /usr/share/sysbench/oltp_read_write.lua \
......
--tables=200 \
--table-size=1000000 \
--report-interval=10 \
--threads=16 \
--time=120

The tps can be improved about 5%.

This patch (of 3):

To optimize page placement in a memory tiering system with NUMA balancing,
the hot pages in the slow memory node need to be identified.  Essentially,
the original NUMA balancing implementation selects the mostly recently
accessed (MRU) pages to promote.  But this isn't a perfect algorithm to
identify the hot pages.  Because the pages with quite low access frequency
may be accessed eventually given the NUMA balancing page table scanning
period could be quite long (e.g.  60 seconds).  The most frequently
accessed (MFU) algorithm is better.

So, in this patch we implemented a better hot page selection algorithm.
Which is based on NUMA balancing page table scanning and hint page fault
as follows,

- When the page tables of the processes are scanned to change PTE/PMD
  to be PROT_NONE, the current time is recorded in struct page as scan
  time.

- When the page is accessed, hint page fault will occur.  The scan
  time is gotten from the struct page.  And The hint page fault
  latency is defined as

    hint page fault time - scan time

The shorter the hint page fault latency of a page is, the higher the
probability of their access frequency to be higher.  So the hint page
fault latency is a better estimation of the page hot/cold.

It's hard to find some extra space in struct page to hold the scan time.
Fortunately, we can reuse some bits used by the original NUMA balancing.

NUMA balancing uses some bits in struct page to store the page accessing
CPU and PID (referring to page_cpupid_xchg_last()).  Which is used by the
multi-stage node selection algorithm to avoid to migrate pages shared
accessed by the NUMA nodes back and forth.  But for pages in the slow
memory node, even if they are shared accessed by multiple NUMA nodes, as
long as the pages are hot, they need to be promoted to the fast memory
node.  So the accessing CPU and PID information are unnecessary for the
slow memory pages.  We can reuse these bits in struct page to record the
scan time.  For the fast memory pages, these bits are used as before.

For the hot threshold, the default value is 1 second, which works well in
our performance test.  All pages with hint page fault latency < hot
threshold will be considered hot.

It's hard for users to determine the hot threshold.  So we don't provide a
kernel ABI to set it, just provide a debugfs interface for advanced users
to experiment.  We will continue to work on a hot threshold automatic
adjustment mechanism.

The downside of the above method is that the response time to the workload
hot spot changing may be much longer.  For example,

- A previous cold memory area becomes hot

- The hint page fault will be triggered.  But the hint page fault
  latency isn't shorter than the hot threshold.  So the pages will
  not be promoted.

- When the memory area is scanned again, maybe after a scan period,
  the hint page fault latency measured will be shorter than the hot
  threshold and the pages will be promoted.

To mitigate this, if there are enough free space in the fast memory node,
the hot threshold will not be used, all pages will be promoted upon the
hint page fault for fast response.

Thanks Zhong Jiang reported and tested the fix for a bug when disabling
memory tiering mode dynamically.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220713083954.34196-1-ying.huang@intel.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220713083954.34196-2-ying.huang@intel.com
Signed-off-by: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com>
Tested-by: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Yang Shi <shy828301@gmail.com>
Cc: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
Cc: Wei Xu <weixugc@google.com>
Cc: osalvador <osalvador@suse.de>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Cc: Zhong Jiang <zhongjiang-ali@linux.alibaba.com>
Cc: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>