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Re: [Qemu-ppc] [PATCH 1/5] virtio-balloon: Remove unnecessary MADV_WILLN


From: Michael S. Tsirkin
Subject: Re: [Qemu-ppc] [PATCH 1/5] virtio-balloon: Remove unnecessary MADV_WILLNEED on deflate
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2019 21:29:24 -0500

On Tue, Mar 05, 2019 at 11:52:08AM +1100, David Gibson wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 08:36:58AM -0500, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 03:39:12PM +1100, David Gibson wrote:
> > > When the balloon is inflated, we discard memory place in it using 
> > > madvise()
> > > with MADV_DONTNEED.  And when we deflate it we use MADV_WILLNEED, which
> > > sounds like it makes sense but is actually unnecessary.
> > > 
> > > The misleadingly named MADV_DONTNEED just discards the memory in question,
> > > it doesn't set any persistent state on it in-kernel; all that's necessary
> > > to bring the memory back is to touch it.  MADV_WILLNEED in contrast
> > > specifically says that the memory will be used soon and faults it in.
> > > 
> > > This patch simplify's the balloon operation by dropping the madvise()
> > > on deflate.  This might have an impact on performance - it will move a
> > > delay at deflate time until that memory is actually touched, which
> > > might be more latency sensitive.  However:
> > > 
> > >   * Memory that's being given back to the guest by deflating the
> > >     balloon *might* be used soon, but it equally could just sit around
> > >     in the guest's pools until needed (or even be faulted out again if
> > >     the host is under memory pressure).
> > > 
> > >   * Usually, the timescale over which you'll be adjusting the balloon
> > >     is long enough that a few extra faults after deflation aren't
> > >     going to make a difference.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: David Gibson <address@hidden>
> > > Reviewed-by: David Hildenbrand <address@hidden>
> > > Reviewed-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <address@hidden>
> > 
> > I'm having second thoughts about this. It might affect performance but
> > probably won't but we have no idea.  Might cause latency jitter after
> > deflate where it previously didn't happen.  This kind of patch should
> > really be accompanied by benchmarking results, not philosophy.
> 
> I guess I see your point, much as it's annoying to spend time
> benchmarking a device that's basically broken by design.

Because of 4K page thing? It's an annoying bug for sure.  There were
patches to add a feature bit to just switch to plan s/g format, but they
were abandoned. You are welcome to revive them though.
Additionally or alternatively, we can easily add a field specifying page size.

> That said.. I don't really know how I'd go about benchmarking it.  Any
> guesses at a suitable workload which would be most likely to show a
> performance degradation here?
> 
> -- 
> David Gibson                  | I'll have my music baroque, and my code
> david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au        | minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ 
> _other_
>                               | _way_ _around_!
> http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson



Here's one idea - I tried to come up with a worst case scenario here.
Basically based on idea by Alex Duyck. All credits are his, all bugs are
mine:


Setup:
Memory-15837 MB
Guest Memory Size-5 GB
Swap-Disabled
Test Program-Simple program which allocates 4GB memory via malloc, touches it 
via memset and exits.
Use case-Number of guests that can be launched completely including the 
successful execution of the test program.
Procedure:
Setup:
A first guest is launched and once its console is up,
test allocation program is executed with 4 GB memory request (Due to
this the guest occupies almost 4-5 GB of memory in the host)
Afterwards balloon is inflated by 4Gbyte in the guest.
We continue launching the guests until a guest gets
killed due to low memory condition in the host.


Now repeatedly, in each guest in turn, balloon is deflated and
test allocation program is executed with 4 GB memory request (Due to
this the guest occupies almost 4-5 GB of memory in the host)
After program finishes balloon is inflated by 4GB again.

Then we switch to another guest.

Time how many cycles of this we can do.


Hope this helps.



-- 
MST



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