mm: retry page fault when blocking on disk transfer

This change reduces mmap_sem hold times that are caused by waiting for
disk transfers when accessing file mapped VMAs.

It introduces the VM_FAULT_ALLOW_RETRY flag, which indicates that the call
site wants mmap_sem to be released if blocking on a pending disk transfer.
In that case, filemap_fault() returns the VM_FAULT_RETRY status bit and
do_page_fault() will then re-acquire mmap_sem and retry the page fault.

It is expected that the retry will hit the same page which will now be
cached, and thus it will complete with a low mmap_sem hold time.

Tests:

- microbenchmark: thread A mmaps a large file and does random read accesses
  to the mmaped area - achieves about 55 iterations/s. Thread B does
  mmap/munmap in a loop at a separate location - achieves 55 iterations/s
  before, 15000 iterations/s after.

- We are seeing related effects in some applications in house, which show
  significant performance regressions when running without this change.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix warning & crash]
Signed-off-by: Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mm.h b/include/linux/mm.h
index 2862009..3bf4665 100644
--- a/include/linux/mm.h
+++ b/include/linux/mm.h
@@ -144,6 +144,7 @@ extern pgprot_t protection_map[16];
 #define FAULT_FLAG_WRITE	0x01	/* Fault was a write access */
 #define FAULT_FLAG_NONLINEAR	0x02	/* Fault was via a nonlinear mapping */
 #define FAULT_FLAG_MKWRITE	0x04	/* Fault was mkwrite of existing pte */
+#define FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY	0x08	/* Retry fault if blocking */
 
 /*
  * This interface is used by x86 PAT code to identify a pfn mapping that is
@@ -723,6 +724,7 @@ static inline int page_mapped(struct page *page)
 
 #define VM_FAULT_NOPAGE	0x0100	/* ->fault installed the pte, not return page */
 #define VM_FAULT_LOCKED	0x0200	/* ->fault locked the returned page */
+#define VM_FAULT_RETRY	0x0400	/* ->fault blocked, must retry */
 
 #define VM_FAULT_HWPOISON_LARGE_MASK 0xf000 /* encodes hpage index for large hwpoison */