linux-toradex.git/mm/vmscan.c, branch v3.18-rc5

mm: memcontrol: fix transparent huge page allocations under pressure

2014-10-10T02:25:59+00:00

In a memcg with even just moderate cache pressure, success rates for
transparent huge page allocations drop to zero, wasting a lot of effort
that the allocator puts into assembling these pages.

The reason for this is that the memcg reclaim code was never designed for
higher-order charges.  It reclaims in small batches until there is room
for at least one page.  Huge page charges only succeed when these batches
add up over a series of huge faults, which is unlikely under any
significant load involving order-0 allocations in the group.

Remove that loop on the memcg side in favor of passing the actual reclaim
goal to direct reclaim, which is already set up and optimized to meet
higher-order goals efficiently.

This brings memcg's THP policy in line with the system policy: if the
allocator painstakingly assembles a hugepage, memcg will at least make an
honest effort to charge it.  As a result, transparent hugepage allocation
rates amid cache activity are drastically improved:

                                      vanilla                 patched
pgalloc                 4717530.80 (  +0.00%)   4451376.40 (  -5.64%)
pgfault                  491370.60 (  +0.00%)    225477.40 ( -54.11%)
pgmajfault                    2.00 (  +0.00%)         1.80 (  -6.67%)
thp_fault_alloc               0.00 (  +0.00%)       531.60 (+100.00%)
thp_fault_fallback          749.00 (  +0.00%)       217.40 ( -70.88%)

[ Note: this may in turn increase memory consumption from internal
  fragmentation, which is an inherent risk of transparent hugepages.
  Some setups may have to adjust the memcg limits accordingly to
  accomodate this - or, if the machine is already packed to capacity,
  disable the transparent huge page feature. ]

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reviewed-by: Vladimir Davydov 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Dave Hansen 
Cc: Greg Thelen 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: clean up zone flags

2014-10-10T02:25:57+00:00

Page reclaim tests zone_is_reclaim_dirty(), but the site that actually
sets this state does zone_set_flag(zone, ZONE_TAIL_LRU_DIRTY), sending the
reader through layers indirection just to track down a simple bit.

Remove all zone flag wrappers and just use bitops against zone->flags
directly.  It's just as readable and the lines are barely any longer.

Also rename ZONE_TAIL_LRU_DIRTY to ZONE_DIRTY to match ZONE_WRITEBACK, and
remove the zone_flags_t typedef.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Acked-by: David Rientjes 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: remove noisy remainder of the scan_unevictable interface

2014-10-10T02:25:55+00:00

The deprecation warnings for the scan_unevictable interface triggers by
scripts doing `sysctl -a | grep something else'.  This is annoying and not
helpful.

The interface has been defunct since 264e56d8247e ("mm: disable user
interface to manually rescue unevictable pages"), which was in 2011, and
there haven't been any reports of usecases for it, only reports that the
deprecation warnings are annying.  It's unlikely that anybody is using
this interface specifically at this point, so remove it.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, compaction: defer each zone individually instead of preferred zone

2014-10-10T02:25:53+00:00

When direct sync compaction is often unsuccessful, it may become deferred
for some time to avoid further useless attempts, both sync and async.
Successful high-order allocations un-defer compaction, while further
unsuccessful compaction attempts prolong the compaction deferred period.

Currently the checking and setting deferred status is performed only on
the preferred zone of the allocation that invoked direct compaction.  But
compaction itself is attempted on all eligible zones in the zonelist, so
the behavior is suboptimal and may lead both to scenarios where 1)
compaction is attempted uselessly, or 2) where it's not attempted despite
good chances of succeeding, as shown on the examples below:

1) A direct compaction with Normal preferred zone failed and set
   deferred compaction for the Normal zone.  Another unrelated direct
   compaction with DMA32 as preferred zone will attempt to compact DMA32
   zone even though the first compaction attempt also included DMA32 zone.

   In another scenario, compaction with Normal preferred zone failed to
   compact Normal zone, but succeeded in the DMA32 zone, so it will not
   defer compaction.  In the next attempt, it will try Normal zone which
   will fail again, instead of skipping Normal zone and trying DMA32
   directly.

2) Kswapd will balance DMA32 zone and reset defer status based on
   watermarks looking good.  A direct compaction with preferred Normal
   zone will skip compaction of all zones including DMA32 because Normal
   was still deferred.  The allocation might have succeeded in DMA32, but
   won't.

This patch makes compaction deferring work on individual zone basis
instead of preferred zone.  For each zone, it checks compaction_deferred()
to decide if the zone should be skipped.  If watermarks fail after
compacting the zone, defer_compaction() is called.  The zone where
watermarks passed can still be deferred when the allocation attempt is
unsuccessful.  When allocation is successful, compaction_defer_reset() is
called for the zone containing the allocated page.  This approach should
approximate calling defer_compaction() only on zones where compaction was
attempted and did not yield allocated page.  There might be corner cases
but that is inevitable as long as the decision to stop compacting dues not
guarantee that a page will be allocated.

Due to a new COMPACT_DEFERRED return value, some functions relying
implicitly on COMPACT_SKIPPED = 0 had to be updated, with comments made
more accurate.  The did_some_progress output parameter of
__alloc_pages_direct_compact() is removed completely, as the caller
actually does not use it after compaction sets it - it is only considered
when direct reclaim sets it.

During testing on a two-node machine with a single very small Normal zone
on node 1, this patch has improved success rates in stress-highalloc
mmtests benchmark.  The success here were previously made worse by commit
3a025760fc15 ("mm: page_alloc: spill to remote nodes before waking
kswapd") as kswapd was no longer resetting often enough the deferred
compaction for the Normal zone, and DMA32 zones on both nodes were thus
not considered for compaction.  On different machine, success rates were
improved with __GFP_NO_KSWAPD allocations.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix CONFIG_COMPACTION=n build]
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Acked-by: Minchan Kim 
Reviewed-by: Zhang Yanfei 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Joonsoo Kim 
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz 
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: memcontrol: use page lists for uncharge batching

2014-08-08T22:57:18+00:00

Pages are now uncharged at release time, and all sources of batched
uncharges operate on lists of pages.  Directly use those lists, and
get rid of the per-task batching state.

This also batches statistics accounting, in addition to the res
counter charges, to reduce IRQ-disabling and re-enabling.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Hugh Dickins 
Cc: Tejun Heo 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: memcontrol: rewrite uncharge API

2014-08-08T22:57:17+00:00

The memcg uncharging code that is involved towards the end of a page's
lifetime - truncation, reclaim, swapout, migration - is impressively
complicated and fragile.

Because anonymous and file pages were always charged before they had their
page->mapping established, uncharges had to happen when the page type
could still be known from the context; as in unmap for anonymous, page
cache removal for file and shmem pages, and swap cache truncation for swap
pages.  However, these operations happen well before the page is actually
freed, and so a lot of synchronization is necessary:

- Charging, uncharging, page migration, and charge migration all need
  to take a per-page bit spinlock as they could race with uncharging.

- Swap cache truncation happens during both swap-in and swap-out, and
  possibly repeatedly before the page is actually freed.  This means
  that the memcg swapout code is called from many contexts that make
  no sense and it has to figure out the direction from page state to
  make sure memory and memory+swap are always correctly charged.

- On page migration, the old page might be unmapped but then reused,
  so memcg code has to prevent untimely uncharging in that case.
  Because this code - which should be a simple charge transfer - is so
  special-cased, it is not reusable for replace_page_cache().

But now that charged pages always have a page->mapping, introduce
mem_cgroup_uncharge(), which is called after the final put_page(), when we
know for sure that nobody is looking at the page anymore.

For page migration, introduce mem_cgroup_migrate(), which is called after
the migration is successful and the new page is fully rmapped.  Because
the old page is no longer uncharged after migration, prevent double
charges by decoupling the page's memcg association (PCG_USED and
pc->mem_cgroup) from the page holding an actual charge.  The new bits
PCG_MEM and PCG_MEMSW represent the respective charges and are transferred
to the new page during migration.

mem_cgroup_migrate() is suitable for replace_page_cache() as well,
which gets rid of mem_cgroup_replace_page_cache().  However, care
needs to be taken because both the source and the target page can
already be charged and on the LRU when fuse is splicing: grab the page
lock on the charge moving side to prevent changing pc->mem_cgroup of a
page under migration.  Also, the lruvecs of both pages change as we
uncharge the old and charge the new during migration, and putback may
race with us, so grab the lru lock and isolate the pages iff on LRU to
prevent races and ensure the pages are on the right lruvec afterward.

Swap accounting is massively simplified: because the page is no longer
uncharged as early as swap cache deletion, a new mem_cgroup_swapout() can
transfer the page's memory+swap charge (PCG_MEMSW) to the swap entry
before the final put_page() in page reclaim.

Finally, page_cgroup changes are now protected by whatever protection the
page itself offers: anonymous pages are charged under the page table lock,
whereas page cache insertions, swapin, and migration hold the page lock.
Uncharging happens under full exclusion with no outstanding references.
Charging and uncharging also ensure that the page is off-LRU, which
serializes against charge migration.  Remove the very costly page_cgroup
lock and set pc->flags non-atomically.

[mhocko@suse.cz: mem_cgroup_charge_statistics needs preempt_disable]
[vdavydov@parallels.com: fix flags definition]
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Hugh Dickins 
Cc: Tejun Heo 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Tested-by: Jet Chen 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Tested-by: Felipe Balbi 
Signed-off-by: Vladimir Davydov 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

memcg, vmscan: Fix forced scan of anonymous pages

2014-08-07T01:01:22+00:00

When memory cgoups are enabled, the code that decides to force to scan
anonymous pages in get_scan_count() compares global values (free,
high_watermark) to a value that is restricted to a memory cgroup (file).
It make the code over-eager to force anon scan.

For instance, it will force anon scan when scanning a memcg that is
mainly populated by anonymous page, even when there is plenty of file
pages to get rid of in others memcgs, even when swappiness == 0.  It
breaks user's expectation about swappiness and hurts performance.

This patch makes sure that forced anon scan only happens when there not
enough file pages for the all zone, not just in one random memcg.

[hannes@cmpxchg.org: cleanups]
Signed-off-by: Jerome Marchand 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, vmscan: fix an outdated comment still mentioning get_scan_ratio

2014-08-07T01:01:22+00:00

Quite a while ago, get_scan_ratio() has been renamed get_scan_count(),
however a comment in shrink_active_list() still mention it.  This patch
fixes the outdated comment.

Signed-off-by: Jerome Marchand 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: move zone->pages_scanned into a vmstat counter

2014-08-07T01:01:20+00:00

zone->pages_scanned is a write-intensive cache line during page reclaim
and it's also updated during page free.  Move the counter into vmstat to
take advantage of the per-cpu updates and do not update it in the free
paths unless necessary.

On a small UMA machine running tiobench the difference is marginal.  On
a 4-node machine the overhead is more noticable.  Note that automatic
NUMA balancing was disabled for this test as otherwise the system CPU
overhead is unpredictable.

          3.16.0-rc3  3.16.0-rc3  3.16.0-rc3
             vanillarearrange-v5   vmstat-v5
User          746.94      759.78      774.56
System      65336.22    58350.98    32847.27
Elapsed     27553.52    27282.02    27415.04

Note that the overhead reduction will vary depending on where exactly
pages are allocated and freed.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: update the description for vm_total_pages

2014-08-07T01:01:20+00:00

vm_total_pages is calculated by nr_free_pagecache_pages(), which counts
the number of pages which are beyond the high watermark within all
zones.  So vm_total_pages is not equal to total number of pages which
the VM controls.

Signed-off-by: Wang Sheng-Hui 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds