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Date:   Tue, 6 Aug 2019 07:19:21 -0400
From:   Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc:     linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
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        Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>,
        Christian Hansen <chansen3@cisco.com>, dancol@google.com,
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        Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>, Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 4/5] page_idle: Drain all LRU pagevec before idle
 tracking
Message-ID: <20190806111921.GB117316@google.com>
References: <20190805170451.26009-1-joel@joelfernandes.org>
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 <20190806084357.GK11812@dhcp22.suse.cz>
 <20190806104554.GB218260@google.com>
 <20190806105149.GT11812@dhcp22.suse.cz>
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On Tue, Aug 06, 2019 at 12:51:49PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Tue 06-08-19 06:45:54, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 06, 2019 at 10:43:57AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > On Mon 05-08-19 13:04:50, Joel Fernandes (Google) wrote:
> > > > During idle tracking, we see that sometimes faulted anon pages are in
> > > > pagevec but are not drained to LRU. Idle tracking considers pages only
> > > > on LRU. Drain all CPU's LRU before starting idle tracking.
> > > 
> > > Please expand on why does this matter enough to introduce a potentially
> > > expensinve draining which has to schedule a work on each CPU and wait
> > > for them to finish.
> > 
> > Sure, I can expand. I am able to find multiple issues involving this. One
> > issue looks like idle tracking is completely broken. It shows up in my
> > testing as if a page that is marked as idle is always "accessed" -- because
> > it was never marked as idle (due to not draining of pagevec).
> > 
> > The other issue shows up as a failure in my "swap test", with the following
> > sequence:
> > 1. Allocate some pages
> > 2. Write to them
> > 3. Mark them as idle                                    <--- fails
> > 4. Introduce some memory pressure to induce swapping.
> > 5. Check the swap bit I introduced in this series.      <--- fails to set idle
> >                                                              bit in swap PTE.
> > 
> > Draining the pagevec in advance fixes both of these issues.
> 
> This belongs to the changelog.

Sure, will add.


> > This operation even if expensive is only done once during the access of the
> > page_idle file. Did you have a better fix in mind?
> 
> Can we set the idle bit also for non-lru pages as long as they are
> reachable via pte?

Not at the moment with the current page idle tracking code. PageLRU(page)
flag is checked in page_idle_get_page().

Even if we could set it for non-LRU, the idle bit (page flag) would not be
cleared if page is not on LRU because page-reclaim code (page_referenced() I
believe) would not clear it. This whole mechanism depends on page-reclaim. Or
did I miss your point?


thanks,

 - Joel