From 6fb8ddfc455ca82a3ce674f54298cd20f27ca518 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Kirill A. Shutemov" Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 15:25:15 -0700 Subject: thp, mlock: update unevictable-lru.txt Add description of THP handling into unevictable-lru.txt. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1466021202-61880-7-git-send-email-kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com Signed-off-by: Kirill A. Shutemov Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Documentation/vm/unevictable-lru.txt | 21 +++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 21 insertions(+) (limited to 'Documentation/vm') diff --git a/Documentation/vm/unevictable-lru.txt b/Documentation/vm/unevictable-lru.txt index fa3b527..0026a8d 100644 --- a/Documentation/vm/unevictable-lru.txt +++ b/Documentation/vm/unevictable-lru.txt @@ -461,6 +461,27 @@ unevictable LRU is enabled, the work of compaction is mostly handled by the page migration code and the same work flow as described in MIGRATING MLOCKED PAGES will apply. +MLOCKING TRANSPARENT HUGE PAGES +------------------------------- + +A transparent huge page is represented by a single entry on an LRU list. +Therefore, we can only make unevictable an entire compound page, not +individual subpages. + +If a user tries to mlock() part of a huge page, we want the rest of the +page to be reclaimable. + +We cannot just split the page on partial mlock() as split_huge_page() can +fail and new intermittent failure mode for the syscall is undesirable. + +We handle this by keeping PTE-mapped huge pages on normal LRU lists: the +PMD on border of VM_LOCKED VMA will be split into PTE table. + +This way the huge page is accessible for vmscan. Under memory pressure the +page will be split, subpages which belong to VM_LOCKED VMAs will be moved +to unevictable LRU and the rest can be reclaimed. + +See also comment in follow_trans_huge_pmd(). mmap(MAP_LOCKED) SYSTEM CALL HANDLING ------------------------------------- -- cgit v1.1