Currently, passing mem-lock=on to QEMU causes memory usage to grow by
huge amounts:
no memlock:
$ ./qemu-system-x86_64 -overcommit mem-lock=off
$ ps -p $(pidof ./qemu-system-x86_64) -o rss=
45652
$ ./qemu-system-x86_64 -overcommit mem-lock=off -enable-kvm
$ ps -p $(pidof ./qemu-system-x86_64) -o rss=
39756
memlock:
$ ./qemu-system-x86_64 -overcommit mem-lock=on
$ ps -p $(pidof ./qemu-system-x86_64) -o rss=
1309876
$ ./qemu-system-x86_64 -overcommit mem-lock=on -enable-kvm
$ ps -p $(pidof ./qemu-system-x86_64) -o rss=
259956
This is caused by the fact that mlockall(2) automatically
write-faults every existing and future anonymous mappings in the
process right away.
One of the reasons to enable mem-lock is to protect a QEMU process'
pages from being compacted and migrated by kcompactd (which does so
by messing with a live process page tables causing thousands of TLB
flush IPIs per second) basically stealing all guest time while it's
active.
mem-lock=on helps against this (given compact_unevictable_allowed is 0),
but the memory overhead it introduces is an undesirable side effect,
which we can completely avoid by passing MCL_ONFAULT to mlockall, which
is what this series allows to do with a new option for mem-lock called
on-fault.
memlock-onfault:
$ ./qemu-system-x86_64 -overcommit mem-lock=on-fault
$ ps -p $(pidof ./qemu-system-x86_64) -o rss=
54004
$ ./qemu-system-x86_64 -overcommit mem-lock=on-fault -enable-kvm
$ ps -p $(pidof ./qemu-system-x86_64) -o rss=
47772
You may notice the memory usage is still slightly higher, in this case
by a few megabytes over the mem-lock=off case. I was able to trace this
down to a bug in the linux kernel with MCL_ONFAULT not being honored for
the early process heap (with brk(2) etc.) so it is still write-faulted in
this case, but it's still way less than it was with just the mem-lock=on.
Changes since v1:
- Don't make a separate mem-lock-onfault, add an on-fault option to
mem-lock instead
Changes since v2:
- Move overcommit option parsing out of line
- Make enable_mlock an enum instead
Changes since v3:
- Rebase to latest master due to the recent sysemu -> system renames
Changes since v4:
- Fix compile errors under FreeBSD and MacOS
Daniil Tatianin (4):
os: add an ability to lock memory on_fault
system/vl: extract overcommit option parsing into a helper
system: introduce a new MlockState enum
overcommit: introduce mem-lock=on-fault
hw/virtio/virtio-mem.c | 2 +-
include/system/os-posix.h | 2 +-
include/system/os-win32.h | 3 ++-
include/system/system.h | 12 ++++++++-
meson.build | 6 +++++
migration/postcopy-ram.c | 4 +--
os-posix.c | 14 +++++++++--
qemu-options.hx | 14 +++++++----
system/globals.c | 12 ++++++++-
system/vl.c | 52 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
10 files changed, 97 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-)
--
2.34.1
