ACK: [gke][PATCH v2] UBUNTU: SAUCE: use CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_MADVISE=y as default

[Kleber Souza]

On 10/05/2017 05:37 PM, Kamal Mostafa wrote:
> From: Colin Ian King <colin.king at canonical.com>
>
> BugLink: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1703742
>
> The current configuration is set to always use transparent hugepages
> by default. There exists plenty of anecdotal evidence that this is
> less than perfect a choice and in some scenarios it leads to some
> performance issues.
>
> My own investigations with stress-ng stream and malloc tests show that
> the current default impacts performance. I ran various test scenarios
> on different MADVISE configurations, each result below is based on
> the average of 5 runs on an i7-3770 CPU @ 3.4GHz with 8GB memory,
> 8MB L3 cache, 256K L2 cache, 32K/32K L1 cache.
>
> All the above results are from an average of 5 rounds of tests.
>
> malloc allocation stressor:
>
>      malloc     always    madvise
>     size (MB)   ops/sec   ops/sec
>          32     1254.43   2422.49
>          64     2100.36   4300.28
>         128     3768.57   7215.38
>         256     7940.73  14893.85
>         512    17618.62  26861.29
>        1024    32777.17  48029.37
>
> Clearly madvise is more performent.
>
> stream bandwidth/compute stressor:
>
>     stream      always    madvise
> 			 NOHUGEPAGE
>     size (MB)   MB/sec     MB/sec
>           1   17713.54   18439.69
>           2   12460.34   13015.46
>           4   12195.81   12694.51
>           8   12085.11   12674.26
>          16   12054.09   12649.00
>          32   12082.42   12409.65
>          64   12262.88   12084.85
>         128   12235.25   11788.49
>         256   11808.69   11283.69
>         512   11970.01   12434.82
>
> For small allocations, always is less performant. Large
> allocations can enable the more performant transparent
> huge pages with madvise(2) if we disable always as default.
>
> Other stress-ng memory allocation/writing/freeing and madvise
> operations showed little significant differences.
>
> I have also experimented with boot testing Ubuntu with kernels
> configured with different MADVISE configs and found there is
> little noticeable difference in performance, so I believe that
> there is little scope for any kitten killer performance regressions
> with this change.
>
> This change will by default not use transparent huge pages unless
> madvise(2) is used to instruct the kernel to do so on a memory
> mapping.  According to the madvise(2) manual, this only takes
> effect on private anonymous mappings with MADV_HUGEPAGE.
>
> Signed-off-by: Colin Ian King <colin.king at canonical.com>
> Signed-off-by: Seth Forshee <seth.forshee at canonical.com>
> Signed-off-by: Kamal Mostafa <kamal at canonical.com>

Change already been tested with Artful and positive test results with GKE.

Acked-by: Kleber Sacilotto de Souza <kleber.souza at canonical.com>

> ---
>  debian.gke/config/annotations          | 4 ++--
>  debian.gke/config/config.common.ubuntu | 4 ++--
>  2 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/debian.gke/config/annotations b/debian.gke/config/annotations
> index bf84251..4886432 100644
> --- a/debian.gke/config/annotations
> +++ b/debian.gke/config/annotations
> @@ -9762,8 +9762,8 @@ CONFIG_HZ_200                                   policy<{'armhf': 'n'}>
>  CONFIG_HZ_500                                   policy<{'armhf': 'n'}>
>
>  # Menu: Processor type and features >> Transparent Hugepage Support sysfs defaults
> -CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_ALWAYS              policy<{'amd64': 'y', 'arm64': 'y', 'armhf-generic-lpae': 'y', 'i386': 'y', 'ppc64el': 'y', 's390x': 'y'}>
> -CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_MADVISE             policy<{'amd64': 'n', 'arm64': 'n', 'armhf-generic-lpae': 'n', 'i386': 'n', 'ppc64el': 'n', 's390x': 'n'}>
> +CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_ALWAYS              policy<{'amd64': 'n', 'arm64': 'y', 'armhf-generic-lpae': 'y', 'i386': 'y', 'ppc64el': 'y', 's390x': 'y'}>
> +CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_MADVISE             policy<{'amd64': 'y', 'arm64': 'n', 'armhf-generic-lpae': 'n', 'i386': 'n', 'ppc64el': 'n', 's390x': 'n'}>
>
>  # Menu: Processor type and features >> Tune code generation >> Architecture: s390
>  CONFIG_TUNE_DEFAULT                             policy<{'s390x': 'n'}>
> diff --git a/debian.gke/config/config.common.ubuntu b/debian.gke/config/config.common.ubuntu
> index ff702ad..65a9714 100644
> --- a/debian.gke/config/config.common.ubuntu
> +++ b/debian.gke/config/config.common.ubuntu
> @@ -6313,8 +6313,8 @@ CONFIG_TRACING=y
>  CONFIG_TRACING_EVENTS_GPIO=y
>  CONFIG_TRACING_SUPPORT=y
>  CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE=y
> -CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_ALWAYS=y
> -# CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_MADVISE is not set
> +# CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_ALWAYS is not set
> +CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_MADVISE=y
>  CONFIG_TREE_RCU=y
>  # CONFIG_TREE_RCU_TRACE is not set
>  CONFIG_TRUSTED_KEYS=y
>