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Shakeel Butt 94968384dd memcg: introduce per-memcg reclaim interface
This patch series adds a memory.reclaim proactive reclaim interface.
The rationale behind the interface and how it works are in the first
patch.


This patch (of 4):

Introduce a memcg interface to trigger memory reclaim on a memory cgroup.

Use case: Proactive Reclaim
---------------------------

A userspace proactive reclaimer can continuously probe the memcg to
reclaim a small amount of memory.  This gives more accurate and up-to-date
workingset estimation as the LRUs are continuously sorted and can
potentially provide more deterministic memory overcommit behavior.  The
memory overcommit controller can provide more proactive response to the
changing behavior of the running applications instead of being reactive.

A userspace reclaimer's purpose in this case is not a complete replacement
for kswapd or direct reclaim, it is to proactively identify memory savings
opportunities and reclaim some amount of cold pages set by the policy to
free up the memory for more demanding jobs or scheduling new jobs.

A user space proactive reclaimer is used in Google data centers. 
Additionally, Meta's TMO paper recently referenced a very similar
interface used for user space proactive reclaim:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3503222.3507731

Benefits of a user space reclaimer:
-----------------------------------

1) More flexible on who should be charged for the cpu of the memory
   reclaim.  For proactive reclaim, it makes more sense to be centralized.

2) More flexible on dedicating the resources (like cpu).  The memory
   overcommit controller can balance the cost between the cpu usage and
   the memory reclaimed.

3) Provides a way to the applications to keep their LRUs sorted, so,
   under memory pressure better reclaim candidates are selected.  This
   also gives more accurate and uptodate notion of working set for an
   application.

Why memory.high is not enough?
------------------------------

- memory.high can be used to trigger reclaim in a memcg and can
  potentially be used for proactive reclaim.  However there is a big
  downside in using memory.high.  It can potentially introduce high
  reclaim stalls in the target application as the allocations from the
  processes or the threads of the application can hit the temporary
  memory.high limit.

- Userspace proactive reclaimers usually use feedback loops to decide
  how much memory to proactively reclaim from a workload.  The metrics
  used for this are usually either refaults or PSI, and these metrics will
  become messy if the application gets throttled by hitting the high
  limit.

- memory.high is a stateful interface, if the userspace proactive
  reclaimer crashes for any reason while triggering reclaim it can leave
  the application in a bad state.

- If a workload is rapidly expanding, setting memory.high to proactively
  reclaim memory can result in actually reclaiming more memory than
  intended.

The benefits of such interface and shortcomings of existing interface were
further discussed in this RFC thread:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/5df21376-7dd1-bf81-8414-32a73cea45dd@google.com/

Interface:
----------

Introducing a very simple memcg interface 'echo 10M > memory.reclaim' to
trigger reclaim in the target memory cgroup.

The interface is introduced as a nested-keyed file to allow for future
optional arguments to be easily added to configure the behavior of
reclaim.

Possible Extensions:
--------------------

- This interface can be extended with an additional parameter or flags
  to allow specifying one or more types of memory to reclaim from (e.g.
  file, anon, ..).

- The interface can also be extended with a node mask to reclaim from
  specific nodes. This has use cases for reclaim-based demotion in memory
  tiering systens.

- A similar per-node interface can also be added to support proactive
  reclaim and reclaim-based demotion in systems without memcg.

- Add a timeout parameter to make it easier for user space to call the
  interface without worrying about being blocked for an undefined amount
  of time.

For now, let's keep things simple by adding the basic functionality.

[yosryahmed@google.com: worked on versions v2 onwards, refreshed to
current master, updated commit message based on recent
discussions and use cases]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220425190040.2475377-1-yosryahmed@google.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220425190040.2475377-2-yosryahmed@google.com
Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Co-developed-by: Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@google.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Wei Xu <weixugc@google.com>
Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Zefan Li <lizefan.x@bytedance.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Shuah Khan <shuah@kernel.org>
Cc: Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Chen Wandun <chenwandun@huawei.com>
Cc: Vaibhav Jain <vaibhav@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: "Michal Koutn" <mkoutny@suse.com>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
2022-04-29 14:36:59 -07:00
arch mm: use for_each_online_node and node_online instead of open coding 2022-04-29 14:36:58 -07:00
block block: don't print I/O error warning for dead disks 2022-04-15 06:33:03 -06:00
certs Kbuild updates for v5.18 2022-03-31 11:59:03 -07:00
crypto for-5.18/64bit-pi-2022-03-25 2022-03-26 12:01:35 -07:00
Documentation memcg: introduce per-memcg reclaim interface 2022-04-29 14:36:59 -07:00
drivers zram: add a huge_idle writeback mode 2022-04-29 14:36:59 -07:00
fs ksm: count ksm merging pages for each process 2022-04-28 23:16:16 -07:00
include kasan: mark KASAN_VMALLOC flags as kasan_vmalloc_flags_t 2022-04-29 14:36:58 -07:00
init Kbuild updates for v5.18 2022-03-31 11:59:03 -07:00
ipc fs: allocate inode by using alloc_inode_sb() 2022-03-22 15:57:03 -07:00
kernel Networking fixes for 5.18-rc5, including fixes from bluetooth, bpf 2022-04-28 12:34:50 -07:00
lib hex2bin: fix access beyond string end 2022-04-27 10:57:33 -07:00
LICENSES LICENSES/LGPL-2.1: Add LGPL-2.1-or-later as valid identifiers 2021-12-16 14:33:10 +01:00
mm memcg: introduce per-memcg reclaim interface 2022-04-29 14:36:59 -07:00
net tcp: fix F-RTO may not work correctly when receiving DSACK 2022-04-28 10:35:38 -07:00
samples dma-mapping updates for Linux 5.18 2022-03-29 08:50:14 -07:00
scripts hardening fixes for v5.18-rc3 2022-04-12 14:29:40 -10:00
security hardening updates for v5.18-rc1-fix1 2022-03-31 11:43:01 -07:00
sound ALSA: hda/realtek: Add quirk for Clevo NP70PNP 2022-04-21 21:23:47 +02:00
tools selftests: vm: fix shellcheck warnings in run_vmtests.sh 2022-04-28 23:16:11 -07:00
usr Kbuild updates for v5.18 2022-03-31 11:59:03 -07:00
virt KVM: SEV: add cache flush to solve SEV cache incoherency issues 2022-04-21 15:41:00 -04:00
.clang-format genirq/msi: Make interrupt allocation less convoluted 2021-12-16 22:22:20 +01:00
.cocciconfig
.get_maintainer.ignore Opt out of scripts/get_maintainer.pl 2019-05-16 10:53:40 -07:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: use 'dts' diff driver for dts files 2019-12-04 19:44:11 -08:00
.gitignore .gitignore: ignore only top-level modules.builtin 2021-05-02 00:43:35 +09:00
.mailmap mailmap: update Vasily Averin's email address 2022-04-08 14:20:36 -10:00
COPYING COPYING: state that all contributions really are covered by this file 2020-02-10 13:32:20 -08:00
CREDITS MAINTAINERS: replace a Microchip AT91 maintainer 2022-02-09 11:30:01 +01:00
Kbuild kbuild: rename hostprogs-y/always to hostprogs/always-y 2020-02-04 01:53:07 +09:00
Kconfig kbuild: ensure full rebuild when the compiler is updated 2020-05-12 13:28:33 +09:00
MAINTAINERS MAINTAINERS: add corresponding kselftests to memcg entry 2022-04-28 23:16:00 -07:00
Makefile Linux 5.18-rc4 2022-04-24 14:51:22 -07:00
README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.