On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 03:09:11PM -0400, Johannes Weiner wrote: > This reverts commit 3a235693d3930e1276c8d9cc0ca5807ef292cf0a. > > Its premise was that cgroup reclaim cares about freeing memory inside > the cgroup, and demotion just moves them around within the cgroup > limit. Hence, pages from toptier nodes should be reclaimed directly. > > However, with NUMA balancing now doing tier promotions, demotion is > part of the page aging process. Global reclaim demotes the coldest > toptier pages to secondary memory, where their life continues and from > which they have a chance to get promoted back. Essentially, tiered > memory systems have an LRU order that spans multiple nodes. > > When cgroup reclaims pages coming off the toptier directly, there can > be colder pages on lower tier nodes that were demoted by global > reclaim. This is an aging inversion, not unlike if cgroups were to > reclaim directly from the active lists while there are inactive pages. > > Proactive reclaim is another factor. The goal of that it is to offload > colder pages from expensive RAM to cheaper storage. When lower tier > memory is available as an intermediate layer, we want offloading to > take advantage of it instead of bypassing to storage. > > Revert the patch so that cgroups respect the LRU order spanning the > memory hierarchy. > > Of note is a specific undercommit scenario, where all cgroup limits in > the system add up to <= available toptier memory. In that case, > shuffling pages out to lower tiers first to reclaim them from there is > inefficient. This is something could be optimized/short-circuited > later on (although care must be taken not to accidentally recreate the > aging inversion). Let's ensure correctness first. > > Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Muchun Song <songmuchun@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Thanks.
