Gah. Try again. On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 01:35:56PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote: > [I should have cc'ed this one to linux-mm as well, so I quote your > reply in full here] > > On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 11:38:52PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 02:42:47PM +1100, npiggin@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > > > Per-zone LRUs and shrinkers for inode cache. > > > > Regardless of whether this is the right way to scale or not, I don't > > like the fact that this moves the cache LRUs into the memory > > management structures, and expands the use of MM specific structures > > throughout the code. > > The zone structure really is the basic unit of memory abstraction > in the whole zoned VM concept (which covers different properties > of both physical address and NUMA cost). > > The zone contains structures for memory management that aren't > otherwise directly related to one another. Generic page waitqueues, > page allocator structures, pagecache reclaim structures, memory model > data, and various statistics. > > Structures to reclaim inodes from a particular zone belong in the > zone struct as much as those to reclaim pagecache or anonymous > memory from that zone too. It actually fits far better in here than > globally, because all our allocation/reclaiming/watermarks etc is > driven per-zone. > > The structure is not frequent -- a couple per NUMA node. > > > > It ties the cache implementation to the current > > VM implementation. That, IMO, goes against all the principle of > > modularisation at the source code level, and it means we have to tie > > all shrinker implemenations to the current internal implementation > > of the VM. I don't think that is wise thing to do because of the > > dependencies and impedance mismatches it introduces. > > It's very fundamental. We allocate memory from, and have to reclaim > memory from -- zones. Memory reclaim is driven based on how the VM > wants to reclaim memory: nothing you can do to avoid some linkage > between the two. > > Look at it this way. The dumb global shrinker is also tied to an > MM implementation detail, but that detail in fact does *not* match > the reality of the MM, and so it has all these problems interacting > with real reclaim. > > What problems? OK, on an N zone system (assuming equal zones and > even distribution of objects around memory), then if there is a shortage > on a particular zone, slabs from _all_ zones are reclaimed. We reclaim > a factor of N too many objects. In a NUMA situation, we also touch > remote memory with a chance (N-1)/N. > > As number of nodes grow beyond 2, this quickly goes down hill. > > In summary, there needs to be some knowledge of how MM reclaims memory > in memory reclaim shrinkers -- simply can't do a good implementation > without that. If the zone concept changes, the MM gets turned upside > down and all those assumptions would need to be revisited anyway. > > > > As an example: XFS inodes to be reclaimed are simply tagged in a > > radix tree so the shrinker can reclaim inodes in optimal IO order > > rather strict LRU order. It simply does not match a zone-based > > This is another problem, similar to what we have in pagecache. In > the pagecache, we need to clean pages in optimal IO order, but we > still reclaim them according to some LRU order. > > If you reclaim them in optimal IO order, cache efficiency will go > down because you sacrifice recency/frequency information. If you > IO in reclaim order, IO efficiency goes down. The solution is to > decouple them with like writeout versus reclaim. > > But anyway, that's kind of an "aside": inode caches are reclaimed > in LRU, IO-suboptimal order today anyway. Per-zone LRU doesn't > change that in the slightest. > > > shrinker implementation in any way, shape or form, nor does it's > > inherent parallelism match that of the way shrinkers are called. > > > > Any change in shrinker infrastructure needs to be able to handle > > these sorts of impedance mismatches between the VM and the cache > > subsystem. The current API doesn't handle this very well, either, > > so it's something that we need to fix so that scalability is easy > > for everyone. > > > > Anyway, my main point is that tying the LRU and shrinker scaling to > > the implementation of the VM is a one-off solution that doesn't work > > for generic infrastructure. > > No it isn't. It worked for the pagecache, and it works for dcache. > > > > Other subsystems need the same > > large-machine scaling treatment, and there's no way we should be > > tying them all into the struct zone. It needs further abstraction. > > An abstraction? Other than the zone? What do you suggest? Invent > something that the VM has no concept of and try to use that? > > No. The zone is the right thing to base it on. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>