Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] Reclamation interactions with RCU

Dave Chinner
2024-02-29T01:29:39Z

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 07:37:58PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 09:19:47PM +0200, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 8:56 PM Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hello!
> > >
> > > Recent discussions [1] suggest that greater mutual understanding between
> > > memory reclaim on the one hand and RCU on the other might be in order.
> > >
> > > One possibility would be an open discussion. If it would help, I would
> > > be happy to describe how RCU reacts and responds to heavy load, along with
> > > some ways that RCU's reactions and responses could be enhanced if needed.
> > >
> >
> > Adding fsdevel as this should probably be a cross track session.
>
> Perhaps broaden this slightly. On the THP Cabal call we just had a
> conversation about the requirements on filesystems in the writeback
> path. We currently tell filesystem authors that the entire writeback
> path must avoid allocating memory in order to prevent deadlock (or use
> GFP_MEMALLOC). Is this appropriate?

The reality is that filesystem developers have been ignoring that
"mm rule" for a couple of decades. It was also discussed at LSFMM a
decade ago (2014 IIRC) without resolution, so in the mean time we
just took control of our own destiny....

> It's a lot of work to assure that
> writing pagecache back will not allocate memory in, eg, the network stack,
> the device driver, and any other layers the write must traverse.
>
> With the removal of ->writepage from vmscan, perhaps we can make
> filesystem authors lives easier by relaxing this requirement as pagecache
> should be cleaned long before we get to reclaiming it.

.... by removing memory reclaim page cache writeback support from
the filesystems entirely.

IOWs, this rule hasn't been valid for a -long- time, so maybe it
is time to remove it. :)

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com