RE: [PATCH 4/5] [RFC][HACK] Add LRU_VOLATILE support to the VM

[Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com>]

> From: Minchan Kim [mailto:minchan@kernel.org]
> Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/5] [RFC][HACK] Add LRU_VOLATILE support to the VM
> 
> On Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 08:46:18AM -0700, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
> > > From: Minchan Kim [mailto:minchan@kernel.org]
> > > To: John Stultz
> > > Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/5] [RFC][HACK] Add LRU_VOLATILE support to the VM
> >
> > Hi Minchan --
> >
> > Thanks for cc'ing me on this!
> >
> > > Targets for the LRU list could be following as in future
> > >
> > > 1. volatile pages in this patchset.
> > > 2. ephemeral pages of tmem
> > > 3. madivse(DONTNEED)
> > > 4. fadvise(NOREUSE)
> > > 5. PG_reclaimed pages
> > > 6. clean pages if we write CFLRU(clean first LRU)
> > >
> > > So if any guys have objection, please raise your hands
> > > before further progress.
> >
> > I agree that the existing shrinker mechanism is too primitive
> > and the kernel needs to take into account more factors in
> > deciding how to quickly reclaim pages from a broader set
> > of sources.  However, I think it is important to ensure
> > that both the "demand" side and the "supply" side are
> > studied.  There has to be some kind of prioritization policy
> > among all the RAM consumers so that a lower-priority
> > alloc_page doesn't cause a higher-priority "volatile" page
> > to be consumed.  I suspect this policy will be VERY hard to
> > define and maintain.
> 
> Yes. It's another story.
> At the moment, VM doesn't consider such priority-inversion problem
> excpet giving the more memory to privileged processes. It's so simple
> but works well till now.

I think it is very important that both stories must be
solved together.  See below...

> > Related, ephemeral pages in tmem are not truly volatile
> 
> "volatile" term is used by John for only his special patch so
> I like Ereclaim(Easy Reclaim) rather than volatile.

If others agree, that's fine.  However, the "E" prefix is
currently used differently in common English (for example,
for e-books).  Maybe "ezreclaim"?

> > as there is always at least one tmem data structure pointing
> > to it.  I haven't followed this thread previously so my apologies
> > if it already has this, but the LRU_VOLATILE list might
> > need to support a per-page "garbage collection" callback.
> 
> Right. That's why this patch provides purgepage in address_space_operations.
> I think zcache could attach own address_space_operations to the page
> which is allocated by zbud for instance, zcache_purgepage which is called by VM
> when the page is reclaimed. So zcache don't need custom LRU policy(but still need
> linked list for managing zbuddy) and pass the decision to the VM.

The simple VM decisions are going to need a lot more intelligence
(and data?) to drive which page to reclaim.  For example, is it better
to reclaim a pageframe that contains two compressed pages of ephemeral data
or a pageframe that has one active (or inactive) file page?  Such
a policy is not "Easy". ;-)

(Also, BTW, zcache pages aren't in any address space so don't have
an address_space_operations... because it is not possible to directly
address the data in a compressed page.)

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