mm: allow a controlled amount of unfairness in the page lock

Commit 2a9127fcf229 ("mm: rewrite wait_on_page_bit_common() logic") made
the page locking entirely fair, in that if a waiter came in while the
lock was held, the lock would be transferred to the lockers strictly in
order.

That was intended to finally get rid of the long-reported watchdog
failures that involved the page lock under extreme load, where a process
could end up waiting essentially forever, as other page lockers stole
the lock from under it.

It also improved some benchmarks, but it ended up causing huge
performance regressions on others, simply because fair lock behavior
doesn't end up giving out the lock as aggressively, causing better
worst-case latency, but potentially much worse average latencies and
throughput.

Instead of reverting that change entirely, this introduces a controlled
amount of unfairness, with a sysctl knob to tune it if somebody needs
to.  But the default value should hopefully be good for any normal load,
allowing a few rounds of lock stealing, but enforcing the strict
ordering before the lock has been stolen too many times.

There is also a hint from Matthieu Baerts that the fair page coloring
may end up exposing an ABBA deadlock that is hidden by the usual
optimistic lock stealing, and while the unfairness doesn't fix the
fundamental issue (and I'm still looking at that), it avoids it in
practice.

The amount of unfairness can be modified by writing a new value to the
'sysctl_page_lock_unfairness' variable (default value of 5, exposed
through /proc/sys/vm/page_lock_unfairness), but that is hopefully
something we'd use mainly for debugging rather than being necessary for
any deep system tuning.

This whole issue has exposed just how critical the page lock can be, and
how contended it gets under certain locks.  And the main contention
doesn't really seem to be anything related to IO (which was the origin
of this lock), but for things like just verifying that the page file
mapping is stable while faulting in the page into a page table.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/ed8442fd-6f54-dd84-cd4a-941e8b7ee603@MichaelLarabel.com/
Link: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-50-59&num=1
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/c560a38d-8313-51fb-b1ec-e904bd8836bc@tessares.net/
Reported-and-tested-by: Michael Larabel <Michael@michaellarabel.com>
Tested-by: Matthieu Baerts <matthieu.baerts@tessares.net>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/sysctl.c b/kernel/sysctl.c
index 09e70ee2332e..afad085960b8 100644
--- a/kernel/sysctl.c
+++ b/kernel/sysctl.c
@@ -2912,6 +2912,14 @@ static struct ctl_table vm_table[] = {
 		.proc_handler	= percpu_pagelist_fraction_sysctl_handler,
 		.extra1		= SYSCTL_ZERO,
 	},
+	{
+		.procname	= "page_lock_unfairness",
+		.data		= &sysctl_page_lock_unfairness,
+		.maxlen		= sizeof(sysctl_page_lock_unfairness),
+		.mode		= 0644,
+		.proc_handler	= proc_dointvec_minmax,
+		.extra1		= SYSCTL_ZERO,
+	},
 #ifdef CONFIG_MMU
 	{
 		.procname	= "max_map_count",