Re: RFC: Memory Tiering Kernel Interfaces (v2)

From: "ying.huang@intel.com" <ying.huang@intel.com>
To: Wei Xu <weixugc@google.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	 Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>,
	"Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@linux.ibm.com>,
	Yang Shi <shy828301@gmail.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	 Jagdish Gediya <jvgediya@linux.ibm.com>,
	Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>,
	Tim C Chen <tim.c.chen@intel.com>,
	 Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>,
	Alistair Popple <apopple@nvidia.com>,
	Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com>,
	Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>,
	Jonathan Cameron <Jonathan.Cameron@huawei.com>,
	Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>,
	Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
	David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>,
	Linux MM <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
	Brice Goglin <brice.goglin@gmail.com>,
	Hesham Almatary <hesham.almatary@huawei.com>
Subject: Re: RFC: Memory Tiering Kernel Interfaces (v2)
Date: Fri, 13 May 2022 11:25:34 +0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <69f2d063a15f8c4afb4688af7b7890f32af55391.camel@intel.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAAPL-u-DGLcKRVDnChN9ZhxPkfxQvz9Sb93kVoX_4J2oiJSkUw@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, 2022-05-11 at 23:22 -0700, Wei Xu wrote:
> 
> Memory Allocation for Demotion
> ==============================
> 
> To allocate a new page as the demotion target for a page, the kernel
> calls the allocation function (__alloc_pages_nodemask) with the
> source page node as the preferred node and the union of all lower
> tier nodes as the allowed nodemask.  The actual target node selection
> then follows the allocation fallback order that the kernel has
> already defined.
> 
> The pseudo code looks like:
> 
>     targets = NODE_MASK_NONE;
>     src_nid = page_to_nid(page);
>     src_tier = node_tier_map[src_nid];
>     for (i = src_tier + 1; i < MAX_MEMORY_TIERS; i++)
>             nodes_or(targets, targets, memory_tiers[i]);
>     new_page = __alloc_pages_nodemask(gfp, order, src_nid, targets);
> 
> The memopolicy of cpuset, vma and owner task of the source page can
> be set to refine the demotion target nodemask, e.g. to prevent
> demotion or select a particular allowed node as the demotion target.

Consider a system with 3 tiers, if we want to demote some pages from
tier 0, the desired behavior is,

- Allocate pages from tier 1
- If there's no enough free pages in tier 1, wakeup kswapd of tier 1 so
demote some pages from tier 1 to tier 2
- If there's still no enough free pages in tier 1, allocate pages from
tier 2.

In this way, tier 0 will have the hottest pages, while tier 1 will have
the coldest pages.

With your proposed method, the demoting from tier 0 behavior is,

- Allocate pages from tier 1
- If there's no enough free pages in tier 1, allocate pages in tier 2

The kswapd of tier 1 will not be waken up until there's no enough free
pages in tier 2.  In quite long time, there's no much hot/cold
differentiation between tier 1 and tier 2.

This isn't hard to be fixed, just call __alloc_pages_nodemask() for each
tier one by one considering page allocation fallback order.

Best Regards,
Huang, Ying