Date:   Tue, 14 Mar 2023 10:00:46 -0300
From:   Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc:     Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>,
        Aaron Tomlin <atomlin@atomlin.com>,
        Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        Russell King <linux@armlinux.org.uk>,
        Huacai Chen <chenhuacai@kernel.org>,
        Heiko Carstens <hca@linux.ibm.com>, x86@kernel.org,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 00/12] fold per-CPU vmstats remotely
Message-ID: <ZBBv/l6NshXFI8vW@tpad>
References: <20230313162507.032200398@redhat.com>
 <ZBBn0evSQeuiNna4@dhcp22.suse.cz>
 <ZBBvuYkWgtVXCV7J@tpad>
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On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 09:59:37AM -0300, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> > Why is that a problem? Out-of-sync stats shouldn't cause major problems.
> > Or can they?
> 
> Consider SCHED_FIFO task that is polling the network queue (say
> testpmd).
> 
> 	do {
> 	 	if (net_registers->state & DATA_AVAILABLE) {
> 			process_data)();
> 		}
> 	 } while (!stopped);
> 
> Since this task runs at SCHED_FIFO priority, kworker won't 
> be scheduled to run (therefore per-CPU vmstats won't be
> flushed to global vmstats). 
> 
> Or, if testpmd runs at SCHED_OTHER, then the work item to
> flush per-CPU vmstats causes
> 
> 	testpmd -> kworker
> 	kworker: flush per-CPU vmstats
> 	kworker -> testpmd
> 
> And this might cause undesired latencies to the packets being
> processed by the testpmd task.

This problem is unrelated to the kswapd problem, but both are addressed
by the patchset.