mm: split underused THPs

This is an attempt to mitigate the issue of running out of memory when THP
is always enabled.  During runtime whenever a THP is being faulted in
(__do_huge_pmd_anonymous_page) or collapsed by khugepaged
(collapse_huge_page), the THP is added to _deferred_list.  Whenever memory
reclaim happens in linux, the kernel runs the deferred_split shrinker
which goes through the _deferred_list.

If the folio was partially mapped, the shrinker attempts to split it.  If
the folio is not partially mapped, the shrinker checks if the THP was
underused, i.e.  how many of the base 4K pages of the entire THP were
zero-filled.  If this number goes above a certain threshold (decided by
/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_none), the
shrinker will attempt to split that THP.  Then at remap time, the pages
that were zero-filled are mapped to the shared zeropage, hence saving
memory.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Usama Arif <[email protected]>
Suggested-by: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>
Cc: Alexander Zhu <[email protected]>
Cc: Barry Song <[email protected]>
Cc: David Hildenbrand <[email protected]>
Cc: Domenico Cerasuolo <[email protected]>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <[email protected]>
Cc: Kairui Song <[email protected]>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <[email protected]>
Cc: Mike Rapoport <[email protected]>
Cc: Nico Pache <[email protected]>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <[email protected]>
Cc: Ryan Roberts <[email protected]>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <[email protected]>
Cc: Shuang Zhai <[email protected]>
Cc: Yu Zhao <[email protected]>
Cc: Shuang Zhai <[email protected]>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
index 56a086900651..aca0cff852b8 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst
@@ -471,6 +471,12 @@ thp_deferred_split_page
 	splitting it would free up some memory. Pages on split queue are
 	going to be split under memory pressure.
 
+thp_underused_split_page
+	is incremented when a huge page on the split queue was split
+	because it was underused. A THP is underused if the number of
+	zero pages in the THP is above a certain threshold
+	(/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_none).
+
 thp_split_pmd
 	is incremented every time a PMD split into table of PTEs.
 	This can happen, for instance, when application calls mprotect() or