[v2,0/3] Userspace controls soft-offline pages

Message

Jiaqi Yan June 11, 2024, 9:55 p.m. UTC

Correctable memory errors are very common on servers with large
amount of memory, and are corrected by ECC, but with two
pain points to users:
1. Correction usually happens on the fly and adds latency overhead
2. Not-fully-proved theory states excessive correctable memory
   errors can develop into uncorrectable memory error.

Soft offline is kernel's additional solution for memory pages
having (excessive) corrected memory errors. Impacted page is migrated
to healthy page if it is in use, then the original page is discarded
for any future use.

The actual policy on whether (and when) to soft offline should be
maintained by userspace, especially in case of an 1G HugeTLB page.
Soft-offline dissolves the HugeTLB page, either in-use or free, into
chunks of 4K pages, reducing HugeTLB pool capacity by 1 hugepage.
If userspace has not acknowledged such behavior, it may be surprised
when later mmap hugepages MAP_FAILED due to lack of hugepages.
In case of a transparent hugepage, it will be split into 4K pages
as well; userspace will stop enjoying the transparent performance.

In addition, discarding the entire 1G HugeTLB page only because of
corrected memory errors sounds very costly and kernel better not
doing under the hood. But today there are at least 2 such cases:
1. GHES driver sees both GHES_SEV_CORRECTED and
   CPER_SEC_ERROR_THRESHOLD_EXCEEDED after parsing CPER.
2. RAS Correctable Errors Collector counts correctable errors per
   PFN and when the counter for a PFN reaches threshold
In both cases, userspace has no control of the soft offline performed
by kernel's memory failure recovery.

This patch series give userspace the control of softofflining any page:
kernel only soft offlines raw page / transparent hugepage / HugeTLB
hugepage if userspace has agreed to. The interface to userspace is a
new sysctl called enable_soft_offline under /proc/sys/vm. By default
enable_soft_line is 1 to preserve existing behavior in kernel.

Changelog

v1 => v2:
* incorporate feedbacks from both Miaohe Lin <[e-mail]> and
  Jane Chu <[e-mail]>.
* make the switch to control all pages, instead of HugeTLB specific.
* change the API from
  /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-${size}kB/softoffline_corrected_errors
  to /proc/sys/vm/enable_soft_offline.
* minor update to test code.
* update documentation of the user control API.
* v2 is based on commit 83a7eefedc9b ("Linux 6.10-rc3").

Jiaqi Yan (3):
  mm/memory-failure: userspace controls soft-offlining pages
  selftest/mm: test enable_soft_offline behaviors
  docs: mm: add enable_soft_offline sysctl

 Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst       |  15 +
 mm/memory-failure.c                           |  16 ++
 tools/testing/selftests/mm/.gitignore         |   1 +
 tools/testing/selftests/mm/Makefile           |   1 +
 .../selftests/mm/hugetlb-soft-offline.c       | 258 ++++++++++++++++++
 tools/testing/selftests/mm/run_vmtests.sh     |   4 +
 6 files changed, 295 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/mm/hugetlb-soft-offline.c