Re: [RFC 0/3] mm: Discard lazily freed pages when migrating

["Huang\, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>]

Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> writes:

> On Tue 03-03-20 16:47:54, Huang, Ying wrote:
>> Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> writes:
>> 
>> > On Tue 03-03-20 09:51:56, Huang, Ying wrote:
>> >> Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> writes:
>> >> > On Mon, Mar 02, 2020 at 07:23:12PM +0800, Huang, Ying wrote:
>> >> >> If some applications cannot tolerate the latency incurred by the memory
>> >> >> allocation and zeroing.  Then we cannot discard instead of migrate
>> >> >> always.  While in some situations, less memory pressure can help.  So
>> >> >> it's better to let the administrator and the application choose the
>> >> >> right behavior in the specific situation?
>> >> >> 
>> >> >
>> >> > Is there an application you have in mind that benefits from discarding
>> >> > MADV_FREE pages instead of migrating them?
>> >> >
>> >> > Allowing the administrator or application to tune this would be very
>> >> > problematic. An application would require an update to the system call
>> >> > to take advantage of it and then detect if the running kernel supports
>> >> > it. An administrator would have to detect that MADV_FREE pages are being
>> >> > prematurely discarded leading to a slowdown and that is hard to detect.
>> >> > It could be inferred from monitoring compaction stats and checking
>> >> > if compaction activity is correlated with higher minor faults in the
>> >> > target application. Proving the correlation would require using the perf
>> >> > software event PERF_COUNT_SW_PAGE_FAULTS_MIN and matching the addresses
>> >> > to MADV_FREE regions that were freed prematurely. That is not an obvious
>> >> > debugging step to take when an application detects latency spikes.
>> >> >
>> >> > Now, you could add a counter specifically for MADV_FREE pages freed for
>> >> > reasons other than memory pressure and hope the administrator knows about
>> >> > the counter and what it means. That type of knowledge could take a long
>> >> > time to spread so it's really very important that there is evidence of
>> >> > an application that suffers due to the current MADV_FREE and migration
>> >> > behaviour.
>> >> 
>> >> OK.  I understand that this patchset isn't a universal win, so we need
>> >> some way to justify it.  I will try to find some application for that.
>> >> 
>> >> Another thought, as proposed by David Hildenbrand, it's may be a
>> >> universal win to discard clean MADV_FREE pages when migrating if there are
>> >> already memory pressure on the target node.  For example, if the free
>> >> memory on the target node is lower than high watermark?
>> >
>> > This is already happening because if the target node is short on memory
>> > it will start to reclaim and if MADV_FREE pages are at the tail of
>> > inactive file LRU list then they will be dropped. Please note how that
>> > follows proper aging and doesn't introduce any special casing. Really
>> > MADV_FREE is an inactive cache for anonymous memory and we treat it like
>> > inactive page cache. This is not carved in stone of course but it really
>> > requires very good justification to change.
>> 
>> If my understanding were correct, the newly migrated clean MADV_FREE
>> pages will be put at the head of inactive file LRU list instead of the
>> tail.  So it's possible that some useful file cache pages will be
>> reclaimed.
>
> This is the case also when you migrate other pages, right? We simply
> cannot preserve the aging.

So you consider the priority of the clean MADV_FREE pages is same as
that of page cache pages?  Because the penalty difference is so large, I
think it may be a good idea to always put clean MADV_FREE pages at the
tail of the inactive file LRU list?

Best Regards,
Huang, Ying