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Date:   Tue, 4 Jun 2019 09:02:28 +0200
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
To:     Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, linux-api@vger.kernel.org,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
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        Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>,
        Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>,
        Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>,
        Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@google.com>,
        Brian Geffon <bgeffon@google.com>, jannh@google.com,
        oleg@redhat.com, christian@brauner.io, oleksandr@redhat.com,
        hdanton@sina.com
Subject: Re: [RFCv2 1/6] mm: introduce MADV_COLD
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On Tue 04-06-19 13:26:51, Minchan Kim wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 03, 2019 at 09:16:07AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
[...]
> > Right. But there is still the page cache reclaim. Is it expected that
> > an explicitly cold memory doesn't get reclaimed because we have a
> > sufficient amount of page cache (a very common case) and we never age
> > anonymous memory because of that?
> 
> If there are lots of used-once pages in file-LRU, I think there is no
> need to reclaim anonymous pages because it needs bigger overhead due to
> IO. It has been true for a long time in current VM policy.

You are making an assumption which is not universally true. If I _know_
that there is a considerable amount of idle anonymous memory then I
would really prefer if it goes to the swap rather than make a pressure
on caching. Inactive list is not guaranteed to contain only used-once
pages, right?

Anyway, as already mentioned, we can start with a simpler implementation
for now and explicitly note that pagecache biased reclaim is known to be
a problem potentially. I am pretty sure somebody will come sooner or
later and we can address the problem then with some good numbers to back
the additional complexity.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs