Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm/damon: introduce damon_rand_fast() for per-ctx PRNG

Jiayuan Chen
2026-04-26T05:50:56Z

Hello SJ

Thanks.

On 4/25/26 11:59 PM, SeongJae Park wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Apr 2026 11:36:02 +0800 Jiayuan Chen <jiayuan.chen@linux.dev> wrote:
>
>> On 4/24/26 11:11 PM, SeongJae Park wrote:
[...]
>> With ~2 GiB
>> default regions on a 2 TiB host, a small pod's pages are averaged
>> with thousands of non-pod pages in the same region, and the
>> region never reaches nr_accesses=0 even when the pod is genuinely
>> idle.
> But, the adaptive regions adjustment mechanism dynamically change size of
> regions, down to 4 KiB. If the small pod's page is really cold while its
> surrounding pages are not, DAMON should down-size the region to capture only
> the page and show you nr_accesses=0.
>

Looking at kdamond_split_regions() / kdamond_merge_regions():
the per-region floor is 4 KiB, but the *total* count is
hard-capped at max_nr_regions, and split itself is blind --
it picks the cut position via damon_rand(1, 10) without looking
at access patterns.  What keeps a split in place is the next
merge cycle finding the two halves have visibly different
nr_accesses; if a small cgroup's signal is averaged with
surrounding host pages on both sides of the random cut, the
halves look identical and merge folds them back.  For a 1%
cgroup on a 2 TiB host with max_nr_regions=1000, the
split-merge loop never converges to cgroup-aligned regions --
random cuts almost always land in "99% host + 1% cgroup"
mixtures.  Raising the cap gives the random splitter enough
attempts that some cuts happen to land on physically-clustered
cgroup pages (THP, NUMA-local allocations) and stick.  That's
why the cap matters in practice, not the 4 KiB floor.

>> The cold signal is gone before any cgroup attribution
>> happens.  Cgroup attribution itself is done at sample granularity
>> (folio_memcg per sampled page), not at region granularity -- the
>> regions just need to be fine enough that there *is* a cold signal
>> to attribute.
> Could you please share more details about what is the cgroup attribution, and
> how it is done? I guess that is the way to map DAMON's monitoring regions to
> each cgroup to determine if each cgroup is hot or cold. I'm unsure how it is
> really be done.

We sample physical pages within DAMON regions, look up
folio_memcg() per sampled page to find the owning memcg, and
accumulate cold bytes per memcg.  Userspace reads the per-cgroup
result and sizes memory.reclaim per pod.  Conceptually similar
to the page-level monitoring you pointed me at -- we'll evaluate
whether [1] / [2] can replace this path.

>>>> With the default max_nr_regions=1000, each region covers ~2 GiB on
>>>> average, which is often larger than the entire target cgroup.
>>>> Adaptive split cannot carve out cgroup-homogeneous regions in that
>>>> regime: each region's nr_accesses averages the (small) cgroup
>>>> fraction with the surrounding non-cgroup pages, and the cgroup's
>>>> access signal gets washed out.
>>> But, pages of cgroups would be scattered around on the physical address space.
>>> So even if DAMON finds a hot or cold region on physical address space that
>>> having a size smaller than a cgroup's memory, it is hard to say if it is for a
>>> specific cgroup. How do you know if the region is for which cgroup? Do you
>>> have a way to make sure pages of same cgroup are gathered on the physical
>>> address space? If not, I'm not sure how ensuring size of region to be equal or
>>> smaller than each cgroup size helps you.
>>>
>>> We are supporting page level monitoring [1] for such cgroup-aware use case.
>>> Are you using it? But again, if you use it, I'm not sure why you need to
>>> ensure DAMON region size smaller than the cgroup size.
>> This is also why DAMOS memcg filters do not bypass the
>> nr_regions constraint -- the scheme's access-pattern matcher
>> operates on the already-averaged region, so by the time any
>> filter sees pages the signal is already lost.  Whatever
>> attribution mechanism we use afterwards (custom callback, memcg
>> filter, page-level reporting), the region count needs to be high
>> enough first.
> But, I'm not understanding why the regions adjustment mechanism cannot work
> here. Your answer to my above question will be helpful.
>
>>> Fyi, I'm also working [2] on making the cgroup-aware monitoring much more
>>> lightweight.
>>
>> Looking forward to it -- hopefully it'll cover our case. 😁
> I hope so, too! :)
>
>>
>>>> Raising max_nr_regions to 10k-20k gives the adaptive split enough
>>>> spatial resolution that cgroup-majority regions can form at cgroup
>>>> boundaries (allocations have enough physical locality in practice for
>>>> this to work -- THP, per-node allocation, etc.).  At that region
>>>> count, damon_rand() starts showing up at the top of kdamond profiles,
>>>> which is what motivated this patch.
>>> Thank you for sharing how this patch has developed. I'm still curious if there
>>> is yet more ways to make DAMON better for your use case. But this patch makes
>>> sense in general to me.
>>>
>>>>> I know some people worry if the limit is too low and it could result in poor
>>>>> monitoring accuracy. Therefore we developed [1] monitoring intervals
>>>>> auto-tuning. From multiple tests on real environment it showed somewhat
>>>>> convincing results, and therefore I nowadays suggest DAMON users to try that if
>>>>> they didn't try.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm bit concerned if this is over-engineering. It would be helpful to know if
>>>>> it is, if you could share the more detailed use case.
>>>> Thanks for pointing to intervals auto-tuning - we do use it.  But it
>>>>
>>>> trades sampling frequency against monitoring overhead; it cannot
>>>> change the spatial resolution.  With N=1000 regions on a 2 TiB host,
>>>> a 20 GiB cgroup cannot be resolved no matter how we tune sample_us /
>>>> aggr_us, because the region boundary itself averages cgroup and
>>>>
>>>> non-cgroup pages together.
>>>>
>>>> So raising max_nr_regions and making the per-region overhead cheap
>>>> are complementary to interval auto-tuning, not redundant with it.
>>> Makes sense. I'm still not sure how it helps for cgroup. But, if you do want
>>> it and if it helps you, you are of course ok to use it in your way, and I will
>>> help you. :)
>>>
>> [...]
>>>> Sashiko is correct that (u32)(r - l) truncates spans greater than 4 GiB.
>>>>
>>>> This is a pre-existing limitation of damon_rand() itself, which
>>>> passes r - l to get_random_u32_below() (a u32 parameter) and
>>>> truncates the same way.  My patch makes that truncation
>>>> explicit but does not introduce a new bug.
>>> You are 100% correct and I agree. Thank you for making this clear. I should
>>> also mentioned and underlined this in my previous reply, but I forgot it.
>>>
>>> So I think this patch is ok to be merged as is (after addressing my nit trivial
>>> comments about coding styles), but we may still want to fix it in future. So I
>> damon_rand() is now only called by damon_split_regions_of() with
>> the constant range (1, 10).  may by we can rename it to
>> damon_rand_u32() to make the u32 constraint explicit in the API
>> name; that closes out the truncation concern at the legacy helper
>> without needing a separate series.
> Good point. I'm wondering if we have a reason to keep using damon_rand() at
> all. I find no such reason. If you also find no real reason, how about simply
> removing existing damon_rand() and renaming damon_rand_fast() to damon_rand()?
>

Good idea.  v2 will remove the legacy helper, rename
damon_rand_fast() to damon_rand(), and plumb ctx into
damon_split_regions_of() for the new signature.

>>> was wondering if such future fix for this new, shiny and efficient function is
>>> easy.
>>
[...]

Thanks!