mm: don't use radix tree writeback tags for pages in swap cache

File pages use a set of radix tree tags (DIRTY, TOWRITE, WRITEBACK,
etc.) to accelerate finding the pages with a specific tag in the radix
tree during inode writeback.  But for anonymous pages in the swap cache,
there is no inode writeback.  So there is no need to find the pages with
some writeback tags in the radix tree.  It is not necessary to touch
radix tree writeback tags for pages in the swap cache.

Per Rik van Riel's suggestion, a new flag AS_NO_WRITEBACK_TAGS is
introduced for address spaces which don't need to update the writeback
tags.  The flag is set for swap caches.  It may be used for DAX file
systems, etc.

With this patch, the swap out bandwidth improved 22.3% (from ~1.2GB/s to
~1.48GBps) in the vm-scalability swap-w-seq test case with 8 processes.
The test is done on a Xeon E5 v3 system.  The swap device used is a RAM
simulated PMEM (persistent memory) device.  The improvement comes from
the reduced contention on the swap cache radix tree lock.  To test
sequential swapping out, the test case uses 8 processes, which
sequentially allocate and write to the anonymous pages until RAM and
part of the swap device is used up.

Details of comparison is as follow,

base             base+patch
---------------- --------------------------
         %stddev     %change         %stddev
             \          |                \
   2506952 ±  2%     +28.1%    3212076 ±  7%  vm-scalability.throughput
   1207402 ±  7%     +22.3%    1476578 ±  6%  vmstat.swap.so
     10.86 ± 12%     -23.4%       8.31 ± 16%  perf-profile.cycles-pp._raw_spin_lock_irq.__add_to_swap_cache.add_to_swap_cache.add_to_swap.shrink_page_list
     10.82 ± 13%     -33.1%       7.24 ± 14%  perf-profile.cycles-pp._raw_spin_lock_irqsave.__remove_mapping.shrink_page_list.shrink_inactive_list.shrink_zone_memcg
     10.36 ± 11%    -100.0%       0.00 ± -1%  perf-profile.cycles-pp._raw_spin_lock_irqsave.__test_set_page_writeback.bdev_write_page.__swap_writepage.swap_writepage
     10.52 ± 12%    -100.0%       0.00 ± -1%  perf-profile.cycles-pp._raw_spin_lock_irqsave.test_clear_page_writeback.end_page_writeback.page_endio.pmem_rw_page

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1472578089-5560-1-git-send-email-ying.huang@intel.com
Signed-off-by: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/swap_state.c b/mm/swap_state.c
index c8310a37be3a..268b8191982b 100644
--- a/mm/swap_state.c
+++ b/mm/swap_state.c
@@ -37,6 +37,8 @@ struct address_space swapper_spaces[MAX_SWAPFILES] = {
 		.page_tree	= RADIX_TREE_INIT(GFP_ATOMIC|__GFP_NOWARN),
 		.i_mmap_writable = ATOMIC_INIT(0),
 		.a_ops		= &swap_aops,
+		/* swap cache doesn't use writeback related tags */
+		.flags		= 1 << AS_NO_WRITEBACK_TAGS,
 	}
 };