GEM-related desktop sluggishness due to linear-time arch_get_unmapped_area_topdown() - dri-devel - freedesktop.org experimental mailing list

28 Mar 2011


      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