Re: [v2 PATCH] mm: vmscan: correct nr_reclaimed for THP

[Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com>]

On 5/16/19 11:10 PM, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 01:44:35PM -0700, Yang Shi wrote:
>> On 5/13/19 11:20 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>> On Mon 13-05-19 21:36:59, Yang Shi wrote:
>>>> On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 2:45 PM Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> wrote:
>>>>> On Mon 13-05-19 14:09:59, Yang Shi wrote:
>>>>> [...]
>>>>>> I think we can just account 512 base pages for nr_scanned for
>>>>>> isolate_lru_pages() to make the counters sane since PGSCAN_KSWAPD/DIRECT
>>>>>> just use it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And, sc->nr_scanned should be accounted as 512 base pages too otherwise we
>>>>>> may have nr_scanned < nr_to_reclaim all the time to result in false-negative
>>>>>> for priority raise and something else wrong (e.g. wrong vmpressure).
>>>>> Be careful. nr_scanned is used as a pressure indicator to slab shrinking
>>>>> AFAIR. Maybe this is ok but it really begs for much more explaining
>>>> I don't know why my company mailbox didn't receive this email, so I
>>>> replied with my personal email.
>>>>
>>>> It is not used to double slab pressure any more since commit
>>>> 9092c71bb724 ("mm: use sc->priority for slab shrink targets"). It uses
>>>> sc->priority to determine the pressure for slab shrinking now.
>>>>
>>>> So, I think we can just remove that "double slab pressure" code. It is
>>>> not used actually and looks confusing now. Actually, the "double slab
>>>> pressure" does something opposite. The extra inc to sc->nr_scanned
>>>> just prevents from raising sc->priority.
>>> I have to get in sync with the recent changes. I am aware there were
>>> some patches floating around but I didn't get to review them. I was
>>> trying to point out that nr_scanned used to have a side effect to be
>>> careful about. If it doesn't have anymore then this is getting much more
>>> easier of course. Please document everything in the changelog.
>> Thanks for reminding. Yes, I remembered nr_scanned would double slab
>> pressure. But, when I inspected into the code yesterday, it turns out it is
>> not true anymore. I will run some test to make sure it doesn't introduce
>> regression.
> Yeah, sc->nr_scanned is used for three things right now:
>
> 1. vmpressure - this looks at the scanned/reclaimed ratio so it won't
> change semantics as long as scanned & reclaimed are fixed in parallel
>
> 2. compaction/reclaim - this is broken. Compaction wants a certain
> number of physical pages freed up before going back to compacting.
> Without Yang Shi's fix, we can overreclaim by a factor of 512.
>
> 3. kswapd priority raising - this is broken. kswapd raises priority if
> we scan fewer pages than the reclaim target (which itself is obviously
> expressed in order-0 pages). As a result, kswapd can falsely raise its
> aggressiveness even when it's making great progress.
>
> Both sc->nr_scanned & sc->nr_reclaimed should be fixed.

Yes, v3 patch (sit in my local repo now) did fix both.

>
>> BTW, I noticed the counter of memory reclaim is not correct with THP swap on
>> vanilla kernel, please see the below:
>>
>> pgsteal_kswapd 21435
>> pgsteal_direct 26573329
>> pgscan_kswapd 3514
>> pgscan_direct 14417775
>>
>> pgsteal is always greater than pgscan, my patch could fix the problem.
> Ouch, how is that possible with the current code?
>
> I think it happens when isolate_lru_pages() counts 1 nr_scanned for a
> THP, then shrink_page_list() splits the THP and we reclaim tail pages
> one by one. This goes all the way back to the initial THP patch!

I think so. It does make sense. But, the weird thing is I just see this 
with synchronous swap device (some THPs got swapped out in a whole, some 
got split), but I've never seen this with rotate swap device (all THPs 
got split).

I haven't figured out why.

>
> isolate_lru_pages() needs to be fixed. Its return value, nr_taken, is
> correct, but its *nr_scanned parameter is wrong, which causes issues:
>
> 1. The trace point, as Yang Shi pointed out, will underreport the
> number of pages scanned, as it reports it along with nr_to_scan (base
> pages) and nr_taken (base pages)
>
> 2. vmstat and memory.stat count 'struct page' operations rather than
> base pages, which makes zero sense to neither user nor kernel
> developers (I routinely multiply these counters by 4096 to get a sense
> of work performed).
>
> All of isolate_lru_pages()'s accounting should be in base pages, which
> includes nr_scanned and PGSCAN_SKIPPED.
>
> That should also simplify the code; e.g.:
>
> 	for (total_scan = 0;
> 	     scan < nr_to_scan && nr_taken < nr_to_scan && !list_empty(src);
> 	     total_scan++) {
>
> scan < nr_to_scan && nr_taken >= nr_to_scan is a weird condition that
> does not make sense in page reclaim imo. Reclaim cares about physical
> memory - freeing one THP is as much progress for reclaim as freeing
> 512 order-0 pages.

Yes, I do agree. The v3 patch did this.

>
> IMO *all* '++' in vmscan.c are suspicious and should be reviewed:
> nr_scanned, nr_reclaimed, nr_dirty, nr_unqueued_dirty, nr_congested,
> nr_immediate, nr_writeback, nr_ref_keep, nr_unmap_fail, pgactivate,
> total_scan & scan, nr_skipped.

Some of them should be fine but I'm not sure the side effect. IMHO, 
let's fix the most obvious problem first.

>
> Yang Shi, it would be nice if you could convert all of these to base
> page accounting in one patch, as it's a single logical fix for the
> initial introduction of THP that had huge pages show up on the LRUs.\

Yes, sure.

>
> [ check_move_unevictable_pages() seems weird. It gets a pagevec from
>    find_get_entries(), which, if I understand the THP page cache code
>    correctly, might contain the same compound page over and over. It'll
>    be !unevictable after the first iteration, so will only run once. So
>    it produces incorrect numbers now, but it is probably best to ignore
>    it until we figure out THP cache. Maybe add an XXX comment. ]