Re: [PATCH 4/4] vfs: keep inodes with page cache off the inode shrinker LRU

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, 14 Jun 2021 17:19:04 -0400 Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> wrote:

> Historically (pre-2.5), the inode shrinker used to reclaim only empty
> inodes and skip over those that still contained page cache. This
> caused problems on highmem hosts: struct inode could put fill lowmem
> zones before the cache was getting reclaimed in the highmem zones.
> 
> To address this, the inode shrinker started to strip page cache to
> facilitate reclaiming lowmem. However, this comes with its own set of
> problems: the shrinkers may drop actively used page cache just because
> the inodes are not currently open or dirty - think working with a
> large git tree. It further doesn't respect cgroup memory protection
> settings and can cause priority inversions between containers.
> 
> Nowadays, the page cache also holds non-resident info for evicted
> cache pages in order to detect refaults. We've come to rely heavily on
> this data inside reclaim for protecting the cache workingset and
> driving swap behavior. We also use it to quantify and report workload
> health through psi. The latter in turn is used for fleet health
> monitoring, as well as driving automated memory sizing of workloads
> and containers, proactive reclaim and memory offloading schemes.
> 
> The consequences of dropping page cache prematurely is that we're
> seeing subtle and not-so-subtle failures in all of the above-mentioned
> scenarios, with the workload generally entering unexpected thrashing
> states while losing the ability to reliably detect it.
> 
> To fix this on non-highmem systems at least, going back to rotating
> inodes on the LRU isn't feasible. We've tried (commit a76cf1a474d7
> ("mm: don't reclaim inodes with many attached pages")) and failed
> (commit 69056ee6a8a3 ("Revert "mm: don't reclaim inodes with many
> attached pages"")). The issue is mostly that shrinker pools attract
> pressure based on their size, and when objects get skipped the
> shrinkers remember this as deferred reclaim work. This accumulates
> excessive pressure on the remaining inodes, and we can quickly eat
> into heavily used ones, or dirty ones that require IO to reclaim, when
> there potentially is plenty of cold, clean cache around still.
> 
> Instead, this patch keeps populated inodes off the inode LRU in the
> first place - just like an open file or dirty state would. An
> otherwise clean and unused inode then gets queued when the last cache
> entry disappears. This solves the problem without reintroducing the
> reclaim issues, and generally is a bit more scalable than having to
> wade through potentially hundreds of thousands of busy inodes.
> 
> Locking is a bit tricky because the locks protecting the inode state
> (i_lock) and the inode LRU (lru_list.lock) don't nest inside the
> irq-safe page cache lock (i_pages.xa_lock). Page cache deletions are
> serialized through i_lock, taken before the i_pages lock, to make sure
> depopulated inodes are queued reliably. Additions may race with
> deletions, but we'll check again in the shrinker. If additions race
> with the shrinker itself, we're protected by the i_lock: if
> find_inode() or iput() win, the shrinker will bail on the elevated
> i_count or I_REFERENCED; if the shrinker wins and goes ahead with the
> inode, it will set I_FREEING and inhibit further igets(), which will
> cause the other side to create a new instance of the inode instead.
> 

And what hitherto unexpected problems will this one cause, sigh.

How exhaustively has this approach been tested?