Transparent huge pages are supported for read-only non-shmem files, but
are only used for vmas with VM_DENYWRITE.  This condition ensures that
file THPs are protected from writes while an application is running
(ETXTBSY).  Any existing file THPs are then dropped from the page cache
when a file is opened for write in do_dentry_open().  Since sys_mmap
ignores MAP_DENYWRITE, this constrains the use of file THPs to vmas
produced by execve().

Systems that make heavy use of shared libraries (e.g.  Android) are unable
to apply VM_DENYWRITE through the dynamic linker, preventing them from
benefiting from the resultant reduced contention on the TLB.

This patch reduces the constraint on file THPs allowing use with any
executable mapping from a file not opened for write (see
inode_is_open_for_write()).  It also introduces additional conditions to
ensure that files opened for write will never be backed by file THPs.

Restricting the use of THPs to executable mappings eliminates the risk
that a read-only file later opened for write would encounter significant
latencies due to page cache truncation.

The ld linker flag '-z max-page-size=(hugepage size)' can be used to
produce executables with the necessary layout.  The dynamic linker must
map these file's segments at a hugepage size aligned vma for the mapping
to be backed with THPs.

Comparison of the performance characteristics of 4KB and 2MB-backed
libraries follows; the Android dex2oat tool was used to AOT compile an
example application on a single ARM core.

4KB Pages:
==========

count              event_name            # count / runtime
598,995,035,942    cpu-cycles            # 1.800861 GHz
 81,195,620,851    raw-stall-frontend    # 244.112 M/sec
347,754,466,597    iTLB-loads            # 1.046 G/sec
  2,970,248,900    iTLB-load-misses      # 0.854122% miss rate

Total test time: 332.854998 seconds.

2MB Pages:
==========

count              event_name            # count / runtime
592,872,663,047    cpu-cycles            # 1.800358 GHz
 76,485,624,143    raw-stall-frontend    # 232.261 M/sec
350,478,413,710    iTLB-loads            # 1.064 G/sec
    803,233,322    iTLB-load-misses      # 0.229182% miss rate

Total test time: 329.826087 seconds

A check of /proc/$(pidof dex2oat64)/smaps shows THPs in use:

/apex/com.android.art/lib64/libart.so
FilePmdMapped:      4096 kB

/apex/com.android.art/lib64/libart-compiler.so
FilePmdMapped:      2048 kB

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210406000930.3455850-1-cfijalkovich@google.com


Signed-off-by: Collin Fijalkovich <cfijalkovich@google.com>
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Reviewed-by: William Kucharski <william.kucharski@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Song Liu <song@kernel.org>
Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>
Cc: Hridya Valsaraju <hridya@google.com>
Cc: Kalesh Singh <kaleshsingh@google.com>
Cc: Tim Murray <timmurray@google.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>