When applications are put into unconfigured cgroups for memory accounting purposes, the cgrouping itself should not change the behavior of the page reclaim code. We expect the VM to reclaim the coldest pages in the system. But right now the VM can reclaim hot pages in one cgroup while there is eligible cold cache in others. This is because one part of the reclaim algorithm isn't truly cgroup hierarchy aware: the inactive/active list balancing. That is the part that is supposed to protect hot cache data from one-off streaming IO. The recursive cgroup reclaim scheme will scan and rotate the physical LRU lists of each eligible cgroup at the same rate in a round-robin fashion, thereby establishing a relative order among the pages of all those cgroups. However, the inactive/active balancing decisions are made locally within each cgroup, so when a cgroup is running low on cold pages, its hot pages will get reclaimed - even when sibling cgroups have plenty of cold cache eligible in the same reclaim run. For example: [root@ham ~]# head -n1 /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 1016336 kB [root@ham ~]# ./reclaimtest2.sh Establishing 50M active files in cgroup A... Hot pages cached: 12800/12800 workingset-a Linearly scanning through 18G of file data in cgroup B: real 0m4.269s user 0m0.051s sys 0m4.182s Hot pages cached: 134/12800 workingset-a The streaming IO in B, which doesn't benefit from caching at all, pushes out most of the workingset in A. Solution This series fixes the problem by elevating inactive/active balancing decisions to the toplevel of the reclaim run. This is either a cgroup that hit its limit, or straight-up global reclaim if there is physical memory pressure. From there, it takes a recursive view of the cgroup subtree to decide whether page deactivation is necessary. In the test above, the VM will then recognize that cgroup B has plenty of eligible cold cache, and that the hot pages in A can be spared: [root@ham ~]# ./reclaimtest2.sh Establishing 50M active files in cgroup A... Hot pages cached: 12800/12800 workingset-a Linearly scanning through 18G of file data in cgroup B: real 0m4.244s user 0m0.064s sys 0m4.177s Hot pages cached: 12800/12800 workingset-a Implementation Whether active pages can be deactivated or not is influenced by two factors: the inactive list dropping below a minimum size relative to the active list, and the occurence of refaults. This patch series first moves refault detection to the reclaim root, then enforces the minimum inactive size based on a recursive view of the cgroup tree's LRUs. History Note that this actually never worked correctly in Linux cgroups. In the past it worked for global reclaim and leaf limit reclaim only (we used to have two physical LRU linkages per page), but it never worked for intermediate limit reclaim over multiple leaf cgroups. We're noticing this now because 1) we're putting everything into cgroups for accounting, not just the things we want to control and 2) we're moving away from leaf limits that invoke reclaim on individual cgroups, toward large tree reclaim, triggered by high-level limits, or physical memory pressure that is influenced by local protections such as memory.low and memory.min instead. Requirements These changes are based on v5.4-rc6-mmotm-2019-11-05-20-44. include/linux/memcontrol.h | 5 + include/linux/mmzone.h | 4 +- include/linux/swap.h | 2 +- mm/vmscan.c | 269 +++++++++++++++++++++++++------------------ mm/workingset.c | 72 +++++++++--- 5 files changed, 223 insertions(+), 129 deletions(-)
