Re: [RFC PATCH 2/2] mm: swap: apply per cgroup swap priority mechansim on swap layer

Kairui Song
2025-06-13T07:38:59Z

On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 3:36 PM Kairui Song <ryncsn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 3:11 PM YoungJun Park <youngjun.park@lge.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 01:08:08PM -0700, Nhat Pham wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 11:20 AM Kairui Song <ryncsn@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 1:28 AM Nhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 4:14 AM Kairui Song <ryncsn@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 6:43 PM <youngjun.park@lge.com> wrote:
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > From: "youngjun.park" <youngjun.park@lge.com>
> > > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Hi, Youngjun,
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Thanks for sharing this series.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > > This patch implements swap device selection and swap on/off propagation
> > > > > > > when a cgroup-specific swap priority is set.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > There is one workaround to this implementation as follows.
> > > > > > > Current per-cpu swap cluster enforces swap device selection based solely
> > > > > > > on CPU locality, overriding the swap cgroup's configured priorities.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I've been thinking about this, we can switch to a per-cgroup-per-cpu
> > > > > > next cluster selector, the problem with current code is that swap
> > > > >
> > > > > What about per-cpu-per-order-per-swap-device :-? Number of swap
> > > > > devices is gonna be smaller than number of cgroups, right?
> > > >
> > > > Hi Nhat,
> > > >
> > > > The problem is per cgroup makes more sense (I was suggested to use
> > > > cgroup level locality at the very beginning of the implementation of
> > > > the allocator in the mail list, but it was hard to do so at that
> > > > time), for container environments, a cgroup is a container that runs
> > > > one type of workload, so it has its own locality. Things like systemd
> > > > also organize different desktop workloads into cgroups. The whole
> > > > point is about cgroup.
> > >
> > > Yeah I know what cgroup represents. Which is why I mentioned in the
> > > next paragraph that are still making decisions based per-cgroup - we
> > > just organize the per-cpu cache based on swap devices. This way, two
> > > cgroups with similar/same priority list can share the clusters, for
> > > each swapfile, in each CPU. There will be a lot less duplication and
> > > overhead. And two cgroups with different priority lists won't
> > > interfere with each other, since they'll target different swapfiles.
> > >
> > > Unless we want to nudge the swapfiles/clusters to be self-partitioned
> > > among the cgroups? :) IOW, each cluster contains pages mostly from a
> > > single cgroup (with some stranglers mixed in). I suppose that will be
> > > very useful for swap on rotational drives where read contiguity is
> > > imperative, but not sure about other backends :-?
> > > Anyway, no strong opinions to be completely honest :) Was just
> > > throwing out some ideas. Per-cgroup-per-cpu-per-order sounds good to
> > > me too, if it's easy to do.
> >
> > Good point!
> > I agree with the mention that self-partitioned clusters and duplicated priority.
> > One concern is the cost of synchronization.
> > Specifically the one incurred when accessing the prioritized swap device
> > From a simple performance perspective, a per-cgroup-per-CPU implementation
> > seems favorable - in line with the current swap allocation fastpath.
> >
> > It seems most reasonable to carefully compare the pros and cons of the
> > tow approaches.
> >
> > To summaraize,
> >
> > Option 1. per-cgroup-per-cpu
> > Pros: upstream fit. performance.
> > Cons: duplicate priority(some memory structure consumtion cost),
> > self partioned cluster
> >
> > Option 2. per-cpu-per-order(per-device)
> > Pros: Cons of Option1
> > Cons: Pros of Option1
> >
> > It's not easy to draw a definitive conclusion right away,
> > I should also evaluate other pros and cons that may arise during actual
> > implementation.
> > so I'd like to take some time to review things in more detail
> > and share my thoughs and conclusions in the next patch series.
> >
> > What do you think, Nhat and Kairui?
>
> Ah, I think what might be best fits here is, each cgroup have a pcp
> device list, and each device have a pcp cluster list:
>
> folio -> mem_cgroup -> swap_priority (maybe a more generic name is
> better?) -> swap_device_pcp (recording only the *si per order)
> swap_device_info -> swap_cluster_pcp (cluster offset per order)

Sorry the truncate made this hard to read, let me try again:

folio ->
mem_cgroup ->
swap_priority (maybe a more generic name is better?) ->
swap_device_pcp (recording only the *si per order)

And:
swap_device_info ->
swap_cluster_pcp (cluster offset per order)

And if mem_cgroup -> swap_priority is NULL,
fallback to a global swap_device_pcp.