Re: [RFC] mm/swap, memcg: Introduce swap tiers for cgroup based swap control

[SeongJae Park <sj@kernel.org>]

On Sat, 15 Nov 2025 18:44:56 +0900 YoungJun Park <youngjun.park@lge.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 05:22:45PM -0800, SeongJae Park wrote:
> > On Sun,  9 Nov 2025 21:49:44 +0900 Youngjun Park <youngjun.park@lge.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > In constrained environments, there is a need to improve workload
> > > performance by controlling swap device usage on a per-process or
> > > per-cgroup basis. For example, one might want to direct critical
> > > processes to faster swap devices (like SSDs) while relegating
> > > less critical ones to slower devices (like HDDs or Network Swap).
> > > 
> > > Initial approach was to introduce a per-cgroup swap priority
> > > mechanism [1]. However, through review and discussion, several
> > > drawbacks were identified:
> > > 
> > > a. There is a lack of concrete use cases for assigning a fine-grained,
> > >    unique swap priority to each cgroup. 
> > > b. The implementation complexity was high relative to the desired
> > >    level of control.
> > > c. Differing swap priorities between cgroups could lead to LRU
> > >    inversion problems.
> > > 
> > > To address these concerns, I propose the "swap tiers" concept, 
> > > originally suggested by Chris Li [2] and further developed through 
> > > collaborative discussions. I would like to thank Chris Li and 
> > > He Baoquan for their invaluable contributions in refining this 
> > > approach, and Kairui Song, Nhat Pham, and Michal Koutný for their 
> > > insightful reviews of earlier RFC versions.
> > 
> > I think the tiers concept is a nice abstraction.  I'm also interested in how
> > the in-kernel control mechanism will deal with tiers management, which is not
> > always simple.  I'll try to take a time to read this series thoroughly.  Thank
> > you for sharing this nice work!
> 
> Hi SeongJae,
> 
> Thank you for your feedback and interest in the swap tiers concept
> I appreciate your willingness to review this series.
> 
> Regarding your question about simpler approaches using memory.reclaim,
> MADV_PAGEOUT, or DAMOS_PAGEOUT with swap device specification - I've
> looked into this perspective after reading your comments. This approach
> would indeed be one way to enable per-process swap device selection
> from a broader standpoint.
> 
> > Nevertheless, I'm curious if there is simpler and more flexible ways to achieve
> > the goal (control of swap device to use).  For example, extending existing
> > proactive pageout features, such as memory.reclaim, MADV_PAGEOUT or
> > DAMOS_PAGEOUT, to let users specify the swap device to use.  Doing such
> > extension for MADV_PAGEOUT may be challenging, but it might be doable for
> > memory.reclaim and DAMOS_PAGEOUT.  Have you considered this kind of options?
> 
> Regarding your question about simpler approaches using memory.reclaim,
> MADV_PAGEOUT, or DAMOS_PAGEOUT with swap device specification - I've
> looked into this perspective after reading your comments. This approach
> would indeed be one way to enable per-process swap device selection
> from a broader standpoint.
> 
> However, for our use case, per-process granularity feels too fine-grained,
> which is why we've been focusing more on the cgroup-based approach.

Thank you for kindly sharing your opinion.  That all makes sense.  Nonetheless,
I think the limitation is only for MADV_PAGEOUT.

MADV_PAGEOUT would indeed have a limitation at applying it on cgroup level.  In
case of memory.reclaim and DAMOS_PAGEOUT, however, I think it can work in
cgroup level, since memory.reclaim exists per cgroup, and DAMOS_PAGEOUT has
knobs for cgroup level controls, including cgroup based DAMOS filters and
per-node per-cgroup memory usage based DAMOS quota goal.  Also, if needed for
swap tiers, extending DAMOS seems doable, to my perspective.

> 
> That said, if we were to aggressively consider the per-process approach
> as well in the future, I'm thinking about how we might integrate it with
> the tier concept(not just indivisual swap device). During discussions with Chris Li, we also talked about
> potentially tying this to per-VMA control (see the discussion at
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/CACePvbW_Q6O2ppMG35gwj7OHCdbjja3qUCF1T7GFsm9VDr2e_g@mail.gmail.com/).
> This concept could go beyond just selection at the cgroup layer.

Sounds interesting.  I once thought extending DAMOS for vma level control
(e.g., asking some DAMOS actions to target only vmas of specific names) could
be useful, in the past.  I have no real plan to do that at the moment due to
the absence of expected usage.  But if that could be used for swap tiers, I
would be happy to help.


Thanks,
SJ

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