commit c9707c205c5f2d917b0126dd8940a6bde64c9f54
author Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> Fri Apr 29 14:36:59 2022 -0700
committer Carlos Llamas <cmllamas@google.com> Thu May 11 02:31:28 2023 +0000
tree 9bb76264f472604f288a32310a8f22f0415d026b
parent dad20f7a85fa29eb6197cd66d8883d6391add768

UPSTREAM: 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
Change-Id: Idaaac964dd5169376fcceca35f0676f847069bce
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>
(cherry picked from commit 94968384dde15d48263bfc59d280cd71b1259d8c)
Bug: 280056627
Signed-off-by: T.J. Mercier <tjmercier@google.com>