Re: xarray breaks thrashing detection and cgroup isolation

[Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>]

On Fri, May 24, 2019 at 09:11:46AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 03:59:33PM -0400, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> > My point is that we cannot have random drivers' internal data
> > structures charge to and pin cgroups indefinitely just because they
> > happen to do the modprobing or otherwise interact with the driver.
> > 
> > It makes no sense in terms of performance or cgroup semantics.
> 
> But according to Roman, you already have that problem with the page
> cache.
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20190522222254.GA5700@castle/T/
> 
> So this argument doesn't make sense to me.

You haven't addressed the rest of the argument though: why every user
of the xarray, and data structures based on it, should incur the
performance cost of charging memory to a cgroup, even when we have no
interest in tracking those allocations on behalf of a cgroup.

Which brings me to repeating the semantics argument: it doesn't make
sense to charge e.g. driver memory, which is arguably a shared system
resource, to whoever cgroup happens to do the modprobe / ioctl etc.

Anyway, this seems like a fairly serious regression, and it would make
sense to find a self-contained, backportable fix instead of something
that has subtle implications for every user of the xarray / ida code.