GEM-related desktop sluggishness due to linear-time arch_get_unmapped_area_topdown()

[Lucas Stach]

Hi,

I have seen this too in some traces I have done with nouveau nvfx some
time ago. (The report in kernel bugzilla is a outcome of this.) I'm
strongly in favour of fixing the kernel side, as I think doing a
workaround in userspace is a bad hack. In fact doing so is on my long
"list of things to fix when I ever get a 48h day".

One thing that pulled me away from this is, that doing something new in
mmap is a bit regression-prone. If we miss some corner case it is very
easy to break someone's application.

--Lucas

Am Montag, den 28.03.2011, 19:16 +0800 schrieb r6144:
> Hello,
> 
> I am reporting a problem of significant desktop sluggishness caused by
> mmap-related kernel algorithms.  In particular, after a few days of use,
> I encounter multiple-second delays switching between a workspace
> containing Evolution and another containing e.g. firefox, which is very
> annoying since I switch workspaces very frequently.  Oprofile indicates
> that, during workspace switching, over 30% of CPU time is spent in
> find_vma(), likely called from arch_get_unmapped_area_topdown().
> 
> This is essentially a repost of https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/11/14/236 ,
> with a bit more investigation and workarounds.  The same issue has also
> been reported in https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17531 , but
> that bug report has not received any attention either.
> 
> My kernel is Fedora 14's kernel-2.6.35.11-83.fc14.x86_64, and the open
> source radeon (r600) driver is used.
> 
> Basically, the GEM/TTM-based r600 driver (and presumably many other
> drivers as well) seems to allocate a buffer object for each XRender
> picture or glyph, and most such objects are mapped into the X server's
> address space with libdrm.  After the system runs for a few days, the
> number of mappings according to "wc -l /proc/$(pgrep Xorg)/maps" can
> reach 5k-10k, with the vast majority being 4kB-sized mappings
> to /dev/dri/card0 almost contiguously laid out in the address space.
> Such a large number of mappings should be expected, given the numerous
> distinct glyphs arising from different CJK characters, fonts, and sizes.
> Note that libdrm_radeon's bo_unmap() keeps a buffer object mapped even
> if it is no longer accessed by the CPU (and only calls munmap() when the
> object is destroyed), which has certainly inflated the mapping count
> significantly, but otherwise the mmap() overhead would be prohibitive.
> 
> Currently the kernel's arch_get_unmapped_area_topdown() is linear-time,
> so further mmap() calls becomes very slow with so many mappings existing
> in the X server's address space.  Since redrawing a window usually
> involves the creation of a significant number of temporary pixmaps or
> XRender pictures, often requiring mapping by the X server, it is thus
> slowed down greatly.  Although arch_get_unmapped_area_topdown() attempts
> to use mm->free_area_cache to speed up the search, the cache is usually
> invalidated due to the mm->cached_hole_size test whenever the block size
> being searched for is smaller than that in the last time; this ensures
> that the function always finds the earliest unmapped area in search
> order that is sufficiently large, thus reducing address space
> fragmentation (commit 1363c3cd).  Consequently, if different mapping
> sizes are used in successive mmap() calls, as is often the case when
> dealing with pixmaps larger than a page in size, the cache would be
> invalidated almost half of the time, and the amortized cost of each
> mmap() remains linear.
> 
> A quantitative measurement is made with the attached pbobench.cpp,
> compiled with Makefile.pbobench.  This program uses OpenGL pixel-buffer
> objects (which corresponds one-to-one to GEM buffer objects on my
> system) to simulate the effect of having a large number of GEM-related
> mappings in the X server.  It first creates and maps N page-sized PBOs
> to mimic the large number of XRender glyphs, then measures the time
> needed to create/map/unmap/destroy more PBOs with size varying between
> 1-16384 bytes.  The time spent per iteration (which does either a
> create/map or an unmap/destroy) is clearly O(N):
> 
> N=100: 17.3us
> N=1000: 19.9us
> N=10000: 88.5us
> N=20000: 205us
> N=40000: 406us
> 
> and in oprofile results, the amount of CPU time spent in find_vma() can
> reach 60-70%, while no other single function takes more than 3%.
> 
> I think this problem is not difficult to solve.  While it isn't obvious
> to me how to find the earliest sufficiently-large unmapped area quickly,
> IMHO it is just as good, fragmentation-wise, if we simply allocate from
> the smallest sufficiently-large unmapped area regardless of its address;
> for this purpose, the final "open-ended" unmapped area in the original
> search order (i.e. the one with the lowest address in
> arch_get_unmapped_area_topdown()) can be regarded as being infinitely
> large, so that it is only used (from the correct "end") when absolutely
> necessary.  In this way, a simple size-indexed rb-tree of the unmapped
> areas will allow the search to be performed in logarithmic time.
> 
> As I'm not good at kernel hacking, for now I have written a userspace
> workaround in libdrm, available from
> https://github.com/r6144/libdrm/tree/my , which reserves some address
> space and then allocates from it using MMAP_FIXED.  Due to laziness, it
> is written in C++ and does not currently combine adjacent free blocks.
> This gives the expected improvements in pbobench results:
> 
> N=100: 18.3us
> N=1000: 18.0us
> N=10000: 18.2us
> N=20000: 18.9us
> N=40000: 20.8us
> N=80000: 23.5us
> NOTE: N=80000 requires increasing /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count
> 
> I am also running Xorg with this modified version of libdrm.  So far it
> runs okay, and seem to be somewhat snappier than before, although as "wc
> -l /proc/$(pgrep Xorg)/maps" has only reached 4369 by now, the
> improvement in responsiveness is not yet that great.  I have not tested
> the algorithm in 32-bit programs though, but intuitively it should work.
> 
> (By the way, after this modification, SELinux's sidtab_search_context()
> appears near the top of the profiling results due to the use of
> linear-time search.  It should eventually be optimized as well.)
> 
> Do you find it worthwhile to implement something similar in the kernel?
> After all, the responsiveness improvement can be quite significant, and
> it seems difficult to make the graphics subsystem do fewer mmap()'s
> (e.g. by storing multiple XRender glyphs in a single buffer object).
> Not to mention that other applications doing lots of mmap()'s for
> whatever reason will benefit as well.
> 
> Please CC me as I'm not subscribed.
> 
> r6144
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