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From:   Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Date:   Fri, 3 Jul 2020 07:23:14 -0700
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Subject: Re: [RFC PROPOSAL] memcg: per-memcg user space reclaim interface
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc:     Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>, Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>,
        Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>,
        Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Linux MM <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Cgroups <cgroups@vger.kernel.org>
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On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:35 PM Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu 02-07-20 08:22:22, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> [...]
> > Interface options:
> > ------------------
> >
> > 1) memcg interface e.g. 'echo 10M > memory.reclaim'
> >
> > + simple
> > + can be extended to target specific type of memory (anon, file, kmem).
> > - most probably restricted to cgroup v2.
> >
> > 2) fadvise(PAGEOUT) on cgroup_dir_fd
> >
> > + more general and applicable to other FSes (actually we are using
> > something similar for tmpfs).
> > + can be extended in future to just age the LRUs instead of reclaim or
> > some new use cases.
>
> Could you explain why memory.high as an interface to trigger pro-active
> memory reclaim is not sufficient. Also memory.low limit to protect
> latency sensitve workloads?

Yes, we can use memory.high to trigger [proactive] reclaim in a memcg
but note that it can also introduce stalls in the application running
in that memcg. Let's suppose the memory.current of a memcg is 100MiB
and we want to reclaim 20MiB from it, we can set the memory.high to
80MiB but any allocation attempt from the application running in that
memcg can get stalled/throttled. I want the functionality of the
reclaim without potential stalls.

The memory.min is for protection against the global reclaim and is
unrelated to this discussion.