Re: [RFC PATCH v2 2/2] mm/damon/paddr: Allow multiple migrate targets

[SeongJae Park <sj@kernel.org>]

On Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:15:00 -0500 Bijan Tabatabai <bijan311@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]
> Hi SeongJae,
> 
> I really appreciate your detailed response.
> The quota auto-tuning helps, but I feel like it's still not exactly
> what I want. For example, I think a quota goal that stops migration
> based on the memory usage balance gets quite a bit more complicated
> when instead of interleaving all data, we are just interleaving *hot*
> data. I haven't looked at it extensively, but I imagine it wouldn't be
> easy to identify how much data is hot in the paddr setting,

I don't think so, and I don't see why you think so.  Could you please
elaborate?

> especially
> because the regions can contain a significant amount of unallocated
> data.

In the case, unallocated data shouldn't be accessed at all, so the region will
just look cold to DAMON.

> Also, if the interleave weights changed, for example, from 11:9
> to 10:10, it would be preferable if only 5% of data is migrated;
> however, with the round robin approach, 50% would be. Finally, and I
> forgot to mention this in my last message, the round-robin approach
> does away with any notion of spatial locality, which does help the
> effectiveness of interleaving [1].

We could use the probabilistic interleaving, if this is the problem?

> I don't think anything done with
> quotas can get around that.

I think I'm not getting your points well, sorry.  More elaboration of your
concern would be helpful.

> I wonder if there's an elegant way to
> specify whether to use rmap or not, but my initial feeling is that
> might just add complication to the code and interface for not enough
> benefit.

Agreed.  Please note that I'm open to add an interface for this behavior if the
benefit is clear.  I'm also thinking adding none-rmap migration first (if it
shows some benefit), and adding rmap support later with additional benefit
confirmation could also be an option.

> 
> Maybe, as you suggest later on, this is an indication that my use case
> is a better fit for a vaddr scheme. I'll get into that more below.
> 
> > > Using the VMA offset to determine where a page
> > > should be placed avoids this problem because it gives a folio a single
> > > node it can be in for a given set of interleave weights. This means
> > > that in steady state, no folios will be migrated.
> >
> > This makes sense for this use case.  But I don't think this makes same sense
> > for possible other use cases, like memory tiering on systems having multiple
> > NUMA nodes of same tier.
> 
> I see where you're coming from. I think the crux of this difference is
> that in my use case, the set of nodes we are monitoring is the same as
> the set of nodes we are migrating to, while in the use case you
> describe, the set of nodes being monitored is disjoint from the set of
> migration target nodes.

I understand and agree this difference.

> I think this in particular makes ping ponging
> more of a problem for my use case, compared to promotion/demotion
> schemes.

But again I'm failing at understanding this, sorry.  Could I ask more
elaborations?

> 
> > If you really need this virtual address space based
> > deterministic behavior, it would make more sense to use virtual address spaces
> > monitoring (damon-vaddr).
> 
> Maybe it does make sense for me to implement vaddr versions of the
> migrate actions for my use case.

Yes, that could also be an option.

> One thing that gives me pause about
> this, is that, from what I understand, it would be harder to have
> vaddr schemes apply to processes that start after damon begins. I
> think to do that, one would have to detect when a process starts, and
> then do a damon tune to upgrade the targets list? It would be nice if,
> say, you could specify a cgroup as a vaddr target and track all
> processes in that cgroup, but that would be a different patchset for
> another day.

I agree that could be a future thing to do.  Note that DAMON user-space tool
implements[1] a similar feature.

> 
> But, using vaddr has other benefits, like the sampling would take into
> account the locality of the accesses. There are also ways to make
> vaddr sampling more efficient by using higher levels of the page
> tables, that I don't think apply to paddr schemes [2]. I believe the
> authors of [2] said they submitted their patches to the kernel, but I
> don't know if it has been upstreamed (sorry about derailing the
> conversation slightly).

Thank you for reminding it.  It was nice finding and approach[2], but
unfortunately it didn't be upstreamed.  I now realize the monitoring intervals
auto-tuning[3] idea was partly motivated by the nice discussion, though.

[1] https://github.com/damonitor/damo/blob/next/release_note#L33
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/damon/20240318132848.82686-1-aravinda.prasad@intel.com/
[3] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250303221726.484227-1-sj@kernel.org


Thanks,
SJ

[...]

> 
> [1] https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.16-rc3/source/mm/mempolicy.c#L213
> [2] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc24/presentation/nair