net-zerocopy: Defer vm zap unless actually needed.

Zapping pages is required only if we are calling vm_insert_page into a region where pages had previously been mapped. Receive zerocopy allows reusing such regions, and hitherto called zap_page_range() before calling vm_insert_page() in that range. zap_page_range() can also be triggered from userspace with madvise(MADV_DONTNEED). If userspace is configured to call this before reusing a segment, or if there was nothing mapped at this virtual address to begin with, we can avoid calling zap_page_range() under the socket lock. That said, if userspace does not do that, then we are still responsible for calling zap_page_range(). This patch adds a flag that the user can use to hint to the kernel that a zap is not required. If the flag is not set, or if an older user application does not have a flags field at all, then the kernel calls zap_page_range as before. Also, if the flag is set but a zap is still required, the kernel performs that zap as necessary. Thus incorrectly indicating that a zap can be avoided does not change the correctness of operation. It also increases the batchsize for vm_insert_pages and prefetches the page struct for the batch since we're about to bump the refcount. An alternative mechanism could be to not have a flag, assume by default a zap is not needed, and fall back to zapping if needed. However, this would harm performance for older applications for which a zap is necessary, and thus we implement it with an explicit flag so newer applications can opt in. When using RPC-style traffic with medium sized (tens of KB) RPCs, this change yields an efficency improvement of about 30% for QPS/CPU usage.

ARArjun Roy committed 5 years ago