runtime: add new page allocator constants and description

This change is the first of a series of changes which replace the
current page allocator (which is based on the contents of mgclarge.go
and some of mheap.go) with one based on free/used bitmaps.

It adds in the key constants for the page allocator as well as a comment
describing the implementation.

Updates #35112.

Change-Id: I839d3a07f46842ad379701d27aa691885afdba63
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/190619
Run-TryBot: Michael Knyszek <mknyszek@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Keith Randall <khr@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Austin Clements <austin@google.com>

1 files changed, 72 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/runtime/mpagealloc.go b/src/runtime/mpagealloc.go
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..1818c7a353
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/runtime/mpagealloc.go
@@ -0,0 +1,72 @@
+// Copyright 2019 The Go Authors. All rights reserved.
+// Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style
+// license that can be found in the LICENSE file.
+
+// Page allocator.
+//
+// The page allocator manages mapped pages (defined by pageSize, NOT
+// physPageSize) for allocation and re-use. It is embedded into mheap.
+//
+// Pages are managed using a bitmap that is sharded into chunks.
+// In the bitmap, 1 means in-use, and 0 means free. The bitmap spans the
+// process's address space. Chunks are allocated using a SLAB allocator
+// and pointers to chunks are managed in one large array, which is mapped
+// in as needed.
+//
+// The bitmap is efficiently searched by using a radix tree in combination
+// with fast bit-wise intrinsics. Allocation is performed using an address-ordered
+// first-fit approach.
+//
+// Each entry in the radix tree is a summary that describes three properties of
+// a particular region of the address space: the number of contiguous free pages
+// at the start and end of the region it represents, and the maximum number of
+// contiguous free pages found anywhere in that region.
+//
+// Each level of the radix tree is stored as one contiguous array, which represents
+// a different granularity of subdivision of the processes' address space. Thus, this
+// radix tree is actually implicit in these large arrays, as opposed to having explicit
+// dynamically-allocated pointer-based node structures. Naturally, these arrays may be
+// quite large for system with large address spaces, so in these cases they are mapped
+// into memory as needed. The leaf summaries of the tree correspond to a bitmap chunk.
+//
+// The root level (referred to as L0 and index 0 in pageAlloc.summary) has each
+// summary represent the largest section of address space (16 GiB on 64-bit systems),
+// with each subsequent level representing successively smaller subsections until we
+// reach the finest granularity at the leaves, a chunk.
+//
+// More specifically, each summary in each level (except for leaf summaries)
+// represents some number of entries in the following level. For example, each
+// summary in the root level may represent a 16 GiB region of address space,
+// and in the next level there could be 8 corresponding entries which represent 2
+// GiB subsections of that 16 GiB region, each of which could correspond to 8
+// entries in the next level which each represent 256 MiB regions, and so on.
+//
+// Thus, this design only scales to heaps so large, but can always be extended to
+// larger heaps by simply adding levels to the radix tree, which mostly costs
+// additional virtual address space. The choice of managing large arrays also means
+// that a large amount of virtual address space may be reserved by the runtime.
+
+package runtime
+
+const (
+	// The size of a bitmap chunk, i.e. the amount of bits (that is, pages) to consider
+	// in the bitmap at once.
+	pallocChunkPages    = 1 << logPallocChunkPages
+	pallocChunkBytes    = pallocChunkPages * pageSize
+	logPallocChunkPages = 9
+	logPallocChunkBytes = logPallocChunkPages + pageShift
+
+	// The number of radix bits for each level.
+	//
+	// The value of 3 is chosen such that the block of summaries we need to scan at
+	// each level fits in 64 bytes (2^3 summaries * 8 bytes per summary), which is
+	// close to the L1 cache line width on many systems. Also, a value of 3 fits 4 tree
+	// levels perfectly into the 21-bit mallocBits summary field at the root level.
+	//
+	// The following equation explains how each of the constants relate:
+	// summaryL0Bits + (summaryLevels-1)*summaryLevelBits + logPallocChunkBytes = heapAddrBits
+	//
+	// summaryLevels is an architecture-dependent value defined in mpagealloc_*.go.
+	summaryLevelBits = 3
+	summaryL0Bits    = heapAddrBits - logPallocChunkBytes - (summaryLevels-1)*summaryLevelBits
+)