mm/page_alloc: do not prefetch buddies during bulk free

free_pcppages_bulk() has taken two passes through the pcp lists since
commit 0a5f4e5b4562 ("mm/free_pcppages_bulk: do not hold lock when
picking pages to free") due to deferring the cost of selecting PCP lists
until the zone lock is held.

As the list processing now takes place under the zone lock, it's less
clear that this will always benefit for two reasons.

1. There is a guaranteed cost to calculating the buddy which definitely
   has to be calculated again. However, as the zone lock is held and
   there is no deferring of buddy merging, there is no guarantee that the
   prefetch will have completed when the second buddy calculation takes
   place and buddies are being merged.  With or without the prefetch, there
   may be further stalls depending on how many pages get merged. In other
   words, a stall due to merging is inevitable and at best only one stall
   might be avoided at the cost of calculating the buddy location twice.

2. As the zone lock is held, prefetch_nr makes less sense as once
   prefetch_nr expires, the cache lines of interest have already been
   merged.

The main concern is that there is a definite cost to calculating the
buddy location early for the prefetch and it is a "maybe win" depending
on whether the CPU prefetch logic and memory is fast enough.  Remove the
prefetch logic on the basis that reduced instructions in a path is
always a saving where as the prefetch might save one memory stall
depending on the CPU and memory.

In most cases, this has marginal benefit as the calculations are a small
part of the overall freeing of pages.  However, it was detectable on at
least one machine.

                              5.17.0-rc3             5.17.0-rc3
                    mm-highpcplimit-v2r1     mm-noprefetch-v1r1
Min       elapsed      630.00 (   0.00%)      610.00 (   3.17%)
Amean     elapsed      639.00 (   0.00%)      623.00 *   2.50%*
Max       elapsed      660.00 (   0.00%)      660.00 (   0.00%)

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220221094119.15282-2-mgorman@techsingularity.net
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Suggested-by: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions