From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> Leonardo Bras has noticed that pcp charge cache draining might be disruptive on workloads relying on 'isolated cpus', a feature commonly used on workloads that are sensitive to interruption and context switching such as vRAN and Industrial Control Systems. There are essentially two ways how to approach the issue. We can either allow the pcp cache to be drained on a different rather than a local cpu or avoid remote flushing on isolated cpus. The current pcp charge cache is really optimized for high performance and it always relies to stick with its cpu. That means it only requires local_lock (preempt_disable on !RT) and draining is handed over to pcp WQ to drain locally again. The former solution (remote draining) would require to add an additional locking to prevent local charges from racing with the draining. This adds an atomic operation to otherwise simple arithmetic fast path in the try_charge path. Another concern is that the remote draining can cause a lock contention for the isolated workloads and therefore interfere with it indirectly via user space interfaces. Another option is to avoid draining scheduling on isolated cpus altogether. That means that those remote cpus would keep their charges even after drain_all_stock returns. This is certainly not optimal either but it shouldn't really cause any major problems. In the worst case (many isolated cpus with charges - each of them with MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH i.e 64 page) the memory consumption of a memcg would be artificially higher than can be immediately used from other cpus. Theoretically a memcg OOM killer could be triggered pre-maturely. Currently it is not really clear whether this is a practical problem though. Tight memcg limit would be really counter productive to cpu isolated workloads pretty much by definition because any memory reclaimed induced by memcg limit could break user space timing expectations as those usually expect execution in the userspace most of the time. Also charges could be left behind on memcg removal. Any future charge on those isolated cpus will drain that pcp cache so this won't be a permanent leak. Considering cons and pros of both approaches this patch is implementing the second option and simply do not schedule remote draining if the target cpu is isolated. This solution is much more simpler. It doesn't add any new locking and it is more more predictable from the user space POV. Should the pre-mature memcg OOM become a real life problem, we can revisit this decision. Cc: Leonardo Brás <leobras@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Muchun Song <muchun.song@xxxxxxxxx> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@xxxxxxxxxx> Reported-by: Leonardo Bras <leobras@xxxxxxxxxx> Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@xxxxxxxxx> Suggested-by: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@xxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> --- mm/memcontrol.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c index 0524add35cae..12559c08d976 100644 --- a/mm/memcontrol.c +++ b/mm/memcontrol.c @@ -2366,7 +2366,7 @@ static void drain_all_stock(struct mem_cgroup *root_memcg) !test_and_set_bit(FLUSHING_CACHED_CHARGE, &stock->flags)) { if (cpu == curcpu) drain_local_stock(&stock->work); - else + else if (!cpu_is_isolated(cpu)) schedule_work_on(cpu, &stock->work); } } -- 2.30.2