malloc: Add madvise support for Transparent Huge Pages

Linux Transparent Huge Pages (THP) current supports three different
states: 'never', 'madvise', and 'always'.  The 'never' is
self-explanatory and 'always' will enable THP for all anonymous
pages.  However, 'madvise' is still the default for some system and
for such case THP will be only used if the memory range is explicity
advertise by the program through a madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) call.

To enable it a new tunable is provided, 'glibc.malloc.hugetlb',
where setting to a value diffent than 0 enables the madvise call.

This patch issues the madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) call after a successful
mmap() call at sysmalloc() with sizes larger than the default huge
page size.  The madvise() call is disable is system does not support
THP or if it has the mode set to "never" and on Linux only support
one page size for THP, even if the architecture supports multiple
sizes.

To test is a new rule is added tests-malloc-hugetlb1, which run the
addes tests with the required GLIBC_TUNABLE setting.

Checked on x86_64-linux-gnu.

Reviewed-by: DJ Delorie <dj@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 2532565..3b94dd2 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -92,6 +92,11 @@ Major new features:
   --enable-static-pie, which no longer has any effect on the build
   configuration.
 
+* On Linux, a new tunable, glibc.malloc.hugetlb, can be used to
+  make malloc issue madvise plus MADV_HUGEPAGE on mmap and sbrk calls.
+  Setting this might improve performance with Transparent Huge Pages madvise
+  mode depending of the workload.
+
 Deprecated and removed features, and other changes affecting compatibility:
 
 * On x86-64, the LD_PREFER_MAP_32BIT_EXEC environment variable support