[PATCH mm v5 RESEND 4/4] mm: automatically penalize tasks with high swap use

Jakub Kicinski
2020-05-21T00:24:21Z

Add a memory.swap.high knob, which can be used to protect the system
from SWAP exhaustion. The mechanism used for penalizing is similar
to memory.high penalty (sleep on return to user space), but with
a less steep slope.

That is not to say that the knob itself is equivalent to memory.high.
The objective is more to protect the system from potentially buggy
tasks consuming a lot of swap and impacting other tasks, or even
bringing the whole system to stand still with complete SWAP
exhaustion. Hopefully without the need to find per-task hard
limits.

Slowing misbehaving tasks down gradually allows user space oom
killers or other protection mechanisms to react. oomd and earlyoom
already do killing based on swap exhaustion, and memory.swap.high
protection will help implement such userspace oom policies more
reliably.

We can use one counter for number of pages allocated under
pressure to save struct task space and avoid two separate
hierarchy walks on the hot path. The exact overage is
calculated on return to user space, anyway.

Take the new high limit into account when determining if swap
is "full". Borrowing the explanation from Johannes:

The idea behind "swap full" is that as long as the workload has plenty
of swap space available and it's not changing its memory contents, it
makes sense to generously hold on to copies of data in the swap
device, even after the swapin. A later reclaim cycle can drop the page
without any IO. Trading disk space for IO.

But the only two ways to reclaim a swap slot is when they're faulted
in and the references go away, or by scanning the virtual address space
like swapoff does - which is very expensive (one could argue it's too
expensive even for swapoff, it's often more practical to just reboot).

So at some point in the fill level, we have to start freeing up swap
slots on fault/swapin. Otherwise we could eventually run out of swap
slots while they're filled with copies of data that is also in RAM.

We don't want to OOM a workload because its available swap space is
filled with redundant cache.

Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
--
v4:
- add a comment on using a single counter for both mem and swap pages
v3:
- count events for all groups over limit
- add doc for high events
- remove the magic scaling factor
- improve commit message
v2:
- add docs
- improve commit message
---
Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst | 20 ++++++
include/linux/memcontrol.h | 1 +
mm/memcontrol.c | 84 +++++++++++++++++++++++--
3 files changed, 99 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
index fed4e1d2a343..1536deb2f28e 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
@@ -1373,6 +1373,22 @@ PAGE_SIZE multiple when read back.
The total amount of swap currently being used by the cgroup
and its descendants.

+ memory.swap.high
+ A read-write single value file which exists on non-root
+ cgroups. The default is "max".
+
+ Swap usage throttle limit. If a cgroup's swap usage exceeds
+ this limit, all its further allocations will be throttled to
+ allow userspace to implement custom out-of-memory procedures.
+
+ This limit marks a point of no return for the cgroup. It is NOT
+ designed to manage the amount of swapping a workload does
+ during regular operation. Compare to memory.swap.max, which
+ prohibits swapping past a set amount, but lets the cgroup
+ continue unimpeded as long as other memory can be reclaimed.
+
+ Healthy workloads are not expected to reach this limit.
+
memory.swap.max
A read-write single value file which exists on non-root
cgroups. The default is "max".
@@ -1386,6 +1402,10 @@ PAGE_SIZE multiple when read back.
otherwise, a value change in this file generates a file
modified event.

+ high
+ The number of times the cgroup's swap usage was over
+ the high threshold.
+
max
The number of times the cgroup's swap usage was about
to go over the max boundary and swap allocation
diff --git a/include/linux/memcontrol.h b/include/linux/memcontrol.h
index d726867d8af9..865afda5b6f0 100644
--- a/include/linux/memcontrol.h
+++ b/include/linux/memcontrol.h
@@ -42,6 +42,7 @@ enum memcg_memory_event {
MEMCG_MAX,
MEMCG_OOM,
MEMCG_OOM_KILL,
+ MEMCG_SWAP_HIGH,
MEMCG_SWAP_MAX,
MEMCG_SWAP_FAIL,
MEMCG_NR_MEMORY_EVENTS,
diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
index d4b7bc80aa38..a92ddaecd28e 100644
--- a/mm/memcontrol.c
+++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
@@ -2334,6 +2334,22 @@ static u64 mem_find_max_overage(struct mem_cgroup *memcg)
return max_overage;
}

+static u64 swap_find_max_overage(struct mem_cgroup *memcg)
+{
+ u64 overage, max_overage = 0;
+
+ do {
+ overage = calculate_overage(page_counter_read(&memcg->swap),
+ READ_ONCE(memcg->swap.high));
+ if (overage)
+ memcg_memory_event(memcg, MEMCG_SWAP_HIGH);
+ max_overage = max(overage, max_overage);
+ } while ((memcg = parent_mem_cgroup(memcg)) &&
+ !mem_cgroup_is_root(memcg));
+
+ return max_overage;
+}
+
/*
* Get the number of jiffies that we should penalise a mischievous cgroup which
* is exceeding its memory.high by checking both it and its ancestors.
@@ -2395,6 +2411,13 @@ void mem_cgroup_handle_over_high(void)
penalty_jiffies = calculate_high_delay(memcg, nr_pages,
mem_find_max_overage(memcg));

+ /*
+ * Make the swap curve more gradual, swap can be considered "cheaper",
+ * and is allocated in larger chunks. We want the delays to be gradual.
+ */
+ penalty_jiffies += calculate_high_delay(memcg, nr_pages,
+ swap_find_max_overage(memcg));
+
/*
* Clamp the max delay per usermode return so as to still keep the
* application moving forwards and also permit diagnostics, albeit
@@ -2585,12 +2608,25 @@ static int try_charge(struct mem_cgroup *memcg, gfp_t gfp_mask,
* reclaim, the cost of mismatch is negligible.
*/
do {
- if (page_counter_is_above_high(&memcg->memory)) {
- /* Don't bother a random interrupted task */
- if (in_interrupt()) {
+ bool mem_high, swap_high;
+
+ mem_high = page_counter_is_above_high(&memcg->memory);
+ swap_high = page_counter_is_above_high(&memcg->swap);
+
+ /* Don't bother a random interrupted task */
+ if (in_interrupt()) {
+ if (mem_high) {
schedule_work(&memcg->high_work);
break;
}
+ continue;
+ }
+
+ if (mem_high || swap_high) {
+ /* Use one counter for number of pages allocated
+ * under pressure to save struct task space and
+ * avoid two separate hierarchy walks.
+ */
current->memcg_nr_pages_over_high += batch;
set_notify_resume(current);
break;
@@ -5013,6 +5049,7 @@ mem_cgroup_css_alloc(struct cgroup_subsys_state *parent_css)

page_counter_set_high(&memcg->memory, PAGE_COUNTER_MAX);
memcg->soft_limit = PAGE_COUNTER_MAX;
+ page_counter_set_high(&memcg->swap, PAGE_COUNTER_MAX);
if (parent) {
memcg->swappiness = mem_cgroup_swappiness(parent);
memcg->oom_kill_disable = parent->oom_kill_disable;
@@ -5166,6 +5203,7 @@ static void mem_cgroup_css_reset(struct cgroup_subsys_state *css)
page_counter_set_low(&memcg->memory, 0);
page_counter_set_high(&memcg->memory, PAGE_COUNTER_MAX);
memcg->soft_limit = PAGE_COUNTER_MAX;
+ page_counter_set_high(&memcg->swap, PAGE_COUNTER_MAX);
memcg_wb_domain_size_changed(memcg);
}

@@ -6987,10 +7025,13 @@ bool mem_cgroup_swap_full(struct page *page)
if (!memcg)
return false;

- for (; memcg != root_mem_cgroup; memcg = parent_mem_cgroup(memcg))
- if (page_counter_read(&memcg->swap) * 2 >=
- READ_ONCE(memcg->swap.max))
+ for (; memcg != root_mem_cgroup; memcg = parent_mem_cgroup(memcg)) {
+ unsigned long usage = page_counter_read(&memcg->swap);
+
+ if (usage * 2 >= READ_ONCE(memcg->swap.high) ||
+ usage * 2 >= READ_ONCE(memcg->swap.max))
return true;
+ }

return false;
}
@@ -7013,6 +7054,29 @@ static u64 swap_current_read(struct cgroup_subsys_state *css,
return (u64)page_counter_read(&memcg->swap) * PAGE_SIZE;
}

+static int swap_high_show(struct seq_file *m, void *v)
+{
+ return seq_puts_memcg_tunable(m,
+ READ_ONCE(mem_cgroup_from_seq(m)->swap.high));
+}
+
+static ssize_t swap_high_write(struct kernfs_open_file *of,
+ char *buf, size_t nbytes, loff_t off)
+{
+ struct mem_cgroup *memcg = mem_cgroup_from_css(of_css(of));
+ unsigned long high;
+ int err;
+
+ buf = strstrip(buf);
+ err = page_counter_memparse(buf, "max", &high);
+ if (err)
+ return err;
+
+ page_counter_set_high(&memcg->swap, high);
+
+ return nbytes;
+}
+
static int swap_max_show(struct seq_file *m, void *v)
{
return seq_puts_memcg_tunable(m,
@@ -7040,6 +7104,8 @@ static int swap_events_show(struct seq_file *m, void *v)
{
struct mem_cgroup *memcg = mem_cgroup_from_seq(m);

+ seq_printf(m, "high %lu\n",
+ atomic_long_read(&memcg->memory_events[MEMCG_SWAP_HIGH]));
seq_printf(m, "max %lu\n",
atomic_long_read(&memcg->memory_events[MEMCG_SWAP_MAX]));
seq_printf(m, "fail %lu\n",
@@ -7054,6 +7120,12 @@ static struct cftype swap_files[] = {
.flags = CFTYPE_NOT_ON_ROOT,
.read_u64 = swap_current_read,
},
+ {
+ .name = "swap.high",
+ .flags = CFTYPE_NOT_ON_ROOT,
+ .seq_show = swap_high_show,
+ .write = swap_high_write,
+ },
{
.name = "swap.max",
.flags = CFTYPE_NOT_ON_ROOT,
--
2.25.4