Hi.

On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 01:13:14PM +0300, Kirill Tkhai wrote:

On 17.01.2020 02:59, Minchan Kim wrote:

quoted

From: Oleksandr Natalenko <redacted>

It all began with the fact that KSM works only on memory that is marked
by madvise(). And the only way to get around that is to either:

  * use LD_PRELOAD; or
  * patch the kernel with something like UKSM or PKSM.

(i skip ptrace can of worms here intentionally)

To overcome this restriction, lets employ a new remote madvise API. This
can be used by some small userspace helper daemon that will do auto-KSM
job for us.

I think of two major consumers of remote KSM hints:

  * hosts, that run containers, especially similar ones and especially in
    a trusted environment, sharing the same runtime like Node.js;

  * heavy applications, that can be run in multiple instances, not
    limited to opensource ones like Firefox, but also those that cannot be
    modified since they are binary-only and, maybe, statically linked.

Speaking of statistics, more numbers can be found in the very first
submission, that is related to this one [1]. For my current setup with
two Firefox instances I get 100 to 200 MiB saved for the second instance
depending on the amount of tabs.

1 FF instance with 15 tabs:

   $ echo "$(cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_sharing) * 4 / 1024" | bc
   410

2 FF instances, second one has 12 tabs (all the tabs are different):

   $ echo "$(cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_sharing) * 4 / 1024" | bc
   592

At the very moment I do not have specific numbers for containerised
workload, but those should be comparable in case the containers share
similar/same runtime.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/1012142/

Signed-off-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <redacted>
---
 mm/madvise.c | 2 ++
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/madvise.c b/mm/madvise.c
index 84cffd0900f1..89557998d287 100644
--- a/mm/madvise.c
+++ b/mm/madvise.c

@@ -1000,6 +1000,8 @@ process_madvise_behavior_valid(int behavior)
 	switch (behavior) {
 	case MADV_COLD:
 	case MADV_PAGEOUT:
+	case MADV_MERGEABLE:
+	case MADV_UNMERGEABLE:
 		return true;
 	default:
 		return false;

Remote madvise on KSM parameters should be OK.

One thing is madvise_behavior_valid() places MADV_MERGEABLE/UNMERGEABLE
in #ifdef brackes, so -EINVAL is returned by madvise() syscall if KSM
is not enabled. Here we should follow the same way for symmetry.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Minchan, shall you adopt it directly, or I should send a separate patch?

-- 
  Best regards,
    Oleksandr Natalenko (post-factum)
    Senior Software Maintenance Engineer