From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from psmtp.com (na3sys010amx157.postini.com [74.125.245.157]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2969C6B0082 for ; Thu, 17 May 2012 23:44:49 -0400 (EDT) Received: by dakp5 with SMTP id p5so4846477dak.14 for ; Thu, 17 May 2012 20:44:48 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <4FB5C5A7.6080000@gmail.com> Date: Fri, 18 May 2012 11:44:39 +0800 From: Nai Xia Reply-To: nai.xia@gmail.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [patch 0/5] refault distance-based file cache sizing References: <1335861713-4573-1-git-send-email-hannes@cmpxchg.org> <4FB33A4E.1010208@gmail.com> <20120516065132.GC1769@cmpxchg.org> <4FB3A416.9010703@gmail.com> <20120517210849.GE1800@cmpxchg.org> In-Reply-To: <20120517210849.GE1800@cmpxchg.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: Johannes Weiner Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, Rik van Riel , Andrea Arcangeli , Peter Zijlstra , Mel Gorman , Andrew Morton , Minchan Kim , Hugh Dickins , KOSAKI Motohiro , linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 2012/05/18 05:08, Johannes Weiner wrote: > On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 08:56:54PM +0800, nai.xia wrote: >> On 2012/05/16 14:51, Johannes Weiner wrote: >>> There may have been improvements from clock-pro, but it's hard to get >>> code merged that does not behave as expected in theory with nobody >>> understanding what's going on. > > Damn, that sounded way harsher and arrogant than I wanted it to sound. > And it's only based on what I gathered from the discussions on the > list archives. Sorry :( No harm done, man. I just understood your words in this way. :) But I do think that Clock-pro deserves its credit, since after all it's that research work firstly brought the idea of "refault/reuse distance" to the kernel community. Further more, it's also good to let the researchers and the community to together have some brain-storm of this problem if it's really hard to deal with in reality. > >> OK, I assume that you do aware that the system you constructed with >> this simple and understandable idea looks like a so called "feedback >> system"? Or in other words, I think theoretically the refault-distance >> of a page before and after your algorithm is applied is not the same. >> And this changed refault-distance pattern is then feed as input into >> your algorithm. A feedback system may be hard(and may be simple) to >> analyze but may also work well magically. > > I'm with you on that, but I can't see an alternative in this case. We I trend to agree, I once tried to deal with an anti-LRU pattern(e.g. the big loop like you said) of a app from kernel space and failed. Seems it's hard to gather a very accurate information of a program's real memory footprint in mixed workloads with only the help of pte bits...(but also may due to my lack of skills in tweaking the reclaiming code...) > can't predict future page accesses very well, so we have to take > speculative shots and be considerate about the consequences. > > And BECAUSE we may get it wrong, the algorithm does not rely on the > decisions it makes to be correct. For example, it does not activate > pages based on refault distance, but requires the refaulted page to > win the race against an actual active page. Likewise, pages are not > evicted from the active list directly, instead they get a chance at > re-activation when challenged. Yes. That sounds a smart handling. -- 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/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: email@kvack.org