Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756399AbbKDXhR (ORCPT ); Wed, 4 Nov 2015 18:37:17 -0500 Received: from mail-ig0-f169.google.com ([209.85.213.169]:37124 "EHLO mail-ig0-f169.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756299AbbKDXhO (ORCPT ); Wed, 4 Nov 2015 18:37:14 -0500 Subject: Re: [PATCH 5/8] mm: move lazily freed pages to inactive list To: Johannes Weiner References: <1446188504-28023-1-git-send-email-minchan@kernel.org> <1446188504-28023-6-git-send-email-minchan@kernel.org> <20151104205504.GA9927@cmpxchg.org> <563A7D21.6040505@gmail.com> <20151104225527.GA25941@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Minchan Kim , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, Michael Kerrisk , linux-api@vger.kernel.org, Hugh Dickins , zhangyanfei@cn.fujitsu.com, Rik van Riel , Mel Gorman , KOSAKI Motohiro , Jason Evans , "Kirill A. Shutemov" , Michal Hocko , yalin.wang2010@gmail.com, Shaohua Li , "Wang, Yalin" From: Daniel Micay X-Enigmail-Draft-Status: N1110 Message-ID: <563A9681.3070102@gmail.com> Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2015 18:36:33 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.3.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20151104225527.GA25941@cmpxchg.org> Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha256; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="k9fBlQIoXhTtk4U9C25rE2uO0iN1dlXss" Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 4808 Lines: 105 This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 4880 and 3156) --k9fBlQIoXhTtk4U9C25rE2uO0iN1dlXss Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable >>> It probably makes sense to stop thinking about them as anonymous page= s >>> entirely at this point when it comes to aging. They're really not. Th= e >>> LRU lists are split to differentiate access patterns and cost of page= >>> stealing (and restoring). From that angle, MADV_FREE pages really hav= e >>> nothing in common with in-use anonymous pages, and so they shouldn't >>> be on the same LRU list. >>> >>> That would also fix the very unfortunate and unexpected consequence o= f >>> tying the lazy free optimization to the availability of swap space. >>> >>> I would prefer to see this addressed before the code goes upstream. >> >> I don't think it would be ideal for these potentially very hot pages t= o >> be dropped before very cold pages were swapped out. It's the kind of >> tuning that needs to be informed by lots of real world experience and >> lots of testing. It wouldn't impact the API. >=20 > What about them is hot? They contain garbage, you have to write to > them before you can use them. Granted, you might have to refetch > cachelines if you don't do cacheline-aligned populating writes, but > you can do a lot of them before it's more expensive than doing IO. It's hot because applications churn through memory via the allocator. Drop the pages and the application is now churning through page faults and zeroing rather than simply reusing memory. It's not something that may happen, it *will* happen. A page in the page cache *may* be reused, but often won't be, especially when the I/O patterns don't line up well with the way it works. The whole point of the feature is not requiring the allocator to have elaborate mechanisms for aging pages and throttling purging. That ends up resulting in lots of memory held by userspace where the kernel can't reclaim it under memory pressure. If it's dropped before page cache, it isn't going to be able to replace any of that logic in allocators. The page cache is speculative. Page caching by allocators is not really speculative. Using MADV_FREE on the pages at all is speculative. The memory is probably going to be reused fairly soon (unless the process exits, and then it doesn't matter), but purging will end up reducing memory usage for the portions that aren't. It would be a different story for a full unpinning/pinning feature since that would have other use cases (speculative caches), but this is really only useful in allocators. >> Whether MADV_FREE is useful as an API vs. something like a pair of >> system calls for pinning and unpinning memory is what should be worrie= d >> about right now. The internal implementation just needs to be correct >> and useful right now, not perfect. Simpler is probably better than it >> being more well tuned for an initial implementation too. >=20 > Yes, it wouldn't impact the API, but the dependency on swap is very > random from a user experience and severely limits the usefulness of > this. It should probably be addressed before this gets released. As > this involves getting the pages off the anon LRU, we need to figure > out where they should go instead. =46rom a user perspective, it doesn't depend on swap. It's just slower without swap because it does what MADV_DONTNEED does. The current implementation can be dropped in where MADV_DONTNEED was previously used.= --k9fBlQIoXhTtk4U9C25rE2uO0iN1dlXss Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: OpenPGP digital signature Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJWOpaBAAoJEPnnEuWa9fIqNWQP/01G5iVFVBbIQokH2gppoWyl TWD9nzJvQ2ZO9zmTSk3RVDfxXIo4y6G8VUVBuENQvLY/pqYue6zRfUcfBkeQxae2 je61D4U1GVeVYB3lF7kWQ/GYT1rjvOYeKLT/xraRwaa64QemkjYa39zeTwgxXiTh yM547phlordgZrCoxicFEeyJ3Hcu+XXgSGCrV4EERNw0Bfhwvue89wHBeLfDACEW I8qJUFEy6JW2lz1lWYIVexnLEDolvY+vZr4gC41rfTlAl+0h/WnR64iSHO8LHlZD Phasl3qFKDwC3T2gsAUbS1/RjTPmFXYXfnWuKSR4PDoYSGnjWLP6LtloMdS4I63P z62kucTIYZwp2EDDYw8usaRo41tJACBi3Edw2bOEOcQrhRQrzRwwr8+KTlYmJ9Xo 1P1bw6sPrnH489k2yFH3SLfgrw1K8RkfIxEIHcboNrC0MwdoY/NUJDl6wtmUvpx+ 3EvnI8Wh0tsRNg02B4RzeOIfFxllqxGKJG+IqHFMVeWA9K1yriG/6GAl6qAvOKnD HueRdzvoj470F2urMeYWOmwGqUlYDKv1cEwVudGFoDiPeBNDq/+1tfovFPEa4R6Q Tocoobef0eXMsVYpIXNfH2kNUcw6aWXg2yVBbJuD0l7J+UwZ5qPTlbwnqiI689/O xqA3vFtsG1pI4TUYjJ9w =Q/En -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --k9fBlQIoXhTtk4U9C25rE2uO0iN1dlXss-- -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/