Re: [PATCH v2 2/5] cgroup: Account for memory_recursiveprot in test_memcg_low()

Andrew Morton
2022-05-10T00:44:24Z

On Mon, 9 May 2022 11:09:15 -0400 Johannes Weiner <hannes-druUgvl0LCNAfugRpC6u6w@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> On Fri, May 06, 2022 at 09:40:15AM -0700, David Vernet wrote:
> > Sorry for the delayed reply, Michal. I've been at LSFMM this week.
> >
> > On Fri, Apr 29, 2022 at 11:26:20AM +0200, Michal Koutný wrote:
> > > I still think that the behavior when there's no protection left for the
> > > memory.low == 0 child, there should be no memory.low events (not just
> > > uncounted but not happening) and test should not accept this (even
> > > though it's the current behavior).
> >
> > That's fair. I think part of the problem here is that in general, the
> > memcontroller itself is quite heuristic, so it's tough to write tests that
> > provide useful coverage while also being sufficiently flexible to avoid
> > flakiness and over-prescribing expected behavior. In this case I think it's
> > probably correct that the memory.low == 0 child shouldn't inherit
> > protection from its parent under any circumstances due to its siblings
> > overcommitting the parent's protection, but I also wonder if it's really
> > necessary to enforce that. If you look at how much memory A/B/E gets at the
> > end of the reclaim, it's still far less than 1MB (though should it be 0?).
> > I'd be curious to hear what Johannes thinks.
>
> We need to distinguish between what the siblings declare and what they
> consume.
>
> My understanding of the issue you're raising, Michal, is that
> protected siblings start with current > low, then get reclaimed
> slightly too much and end up with current < low. This results in a
> tiny bit of float that then gets assigned to the low=0 sibling; when
> that sibling gets reclaimed regardless, it sees a low event. Correct
> me if I missed a detail or nuance here.
>
> But unused float going to siblings is intentional. This is documented
> in point 3 in the comment above effective_protection(): if you use
> less than you're legitimately claiming, the float goes to your
> siblings. So the problem doesn't seem to be with low accounting and
> event generation, but rather it's simply overreclaim.
>
> It's conceivable to make reclaim more precise and then tighten up the
> test. But right now, David's patch looks correct to me.

So I think we're OK with [2/5] now. Unless there be objections, I'll
be looking to get this series into mm-stable later this week.