From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from psmtp.com (na3sys010amx181.postini.com [74.125.245.181]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4C57F6B0044 for ; Wed, 7 Nov 2012 07:31:19 -0500 (EST) Received: by mail-da0-f41.google.com with SMTP id i14so737579dad.14 for ; Wed, 07 Nov 2012 04:31:18 -0800 (PST) Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2012 04:28:13 -0800 From: Anton Vorontsov Subject: Re: [RFC v3 0/3] vmpressure_fd: Linux VM pressure notifications Message-ID: <20121107122813.GA4968@lizard> References: <20121107105348.GA25549@lizard> <20121107112136.GA31715@shutemov.name> <20121107114346.GA32565@lizard> <20121107121110.GA32402@shutemov.name> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20121107121110.GA32402@shutemov.name> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: "Kirill A. Shutemov" Cc: Mel Gorman , Pekka Enberg , Leonid Moiseichuk , KOSAKI Motohiro , Minchan Kim , Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz , John Stultz , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linaro-kernel@lists.linaro.org, patches@linaro.org, kernel-team@android.com, linux-man@vger.kernel.org, Glauber Costa On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 02:11:10PM +0200, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote: [...] > > We can have plenty of "free" memory, of which say 90% will be caches, > > and say 10% idle. But we do want to differentiate these types of memory > > (although not going into details about it), i.e. we want to get > > notified when kernel is reclaiming. And we also want to know when the > > memory comes from swapping others' pages out (well, actually we don't > > call it swap, it's "new allocations cost becomes high" -- it might be a > > result of many factors (swapping, fragmentation, etc.) -- and userland > > might analyze the situation when this happens). > > > > Exposing all the VM details to userland is not an option > > IIUC, you want MemFree + Buffers + Cached + SwapCached, right? > It's already exposed to userspace. How? If you mean vmstat, then no, that interface is not efficient at all: we have to poll it from userland, which is no go for embedded (although, as a workaround it can be done via deferrable timers in userland, which I posted a few months ago). But even with polling vmstat via deferrable timers, it leaves us with the ugly timers-based approach (and no way to catch the pre-OOM conditions). With vmpressure_fd() we have the synchronous notifications right from the core (upon which, you can, if you want to, analyze the vmstat). >> 2. The last time I checked, cgroups memory controller did not (and I guess >> still does not) not account kernel-owned slabs. I asked several times >> why so, but nobody answered. > > Almost there. Glauber works on it. It's good to hear, but still, the number of "used KBs" is a bad (or irrelevant) metric for the pressure. We'd still need to analyze the memory in more details, and "'limit - used' KBs" doesn't tell us anything about the cost of the available memory. Thanks, Anton. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org