[PATCH 3/4] mm: move lazy free pages to inactive list

Minchan Kim
2015-03-11T01:21:34Z

MADV_FREE is hint that it's okay to discard pages if there is
memory pressure and we uses reclaimers(ie, kswapd and direct reclaim)
to free them so there is no worth to remain them in active anonymous LRU
so this patch moves them to inactive LRU list's head.

This means that MADV_FREE-ed pages which were living on the inactive list
are reclaimed first because they are more likely to be cold rather than
recently active pages.

A arguable issue for the approach would be whether we should put it to
head or tail in inactive list. I selected *head* because kernel cannot
make sure it's really cold or warm for every MADV_FREE usecase but
at least we know it's not *hot* so landing of inactive head would be
comprimise for various usecases.

This is fixing a suboptimal behavior of MADV_FREE when pages living on
the active list will sit there for a long time even under memory
pressure while the inactive list is reclaimed heavily. This basically
breaks the whole purpose of using MADV_FREE to help the system to free
memory which is might not be used.

Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
---
include/linux/swap.h | 1 +
mm/madvise.c | 2 ++
mm/swap.c | 35 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3 files changed, 38 insertions(+)

diff --git a/include/linux/swap.h b/include/linux/swap.h
index cee108c..0428e4c 100644
--- a/include/linux/swap.h
+++ b/include/linux/swap.h
@@ -308,6 +308,7 @@ extern void lru_add_drain_cpu(int cpu);
extern void lru_add_drain_all(void);
extern void rotate_reclaimable_page(struct page *page);
extern void deactivate_file_page(struct page *page);
+extern void deactivate_page(struct page *page);
extern void swap_setup(void);

extern void add_page_to_unevictable_list(struct page *page);
diff --git a/mm/madvise.c b/mm/madvise.c
index ebe692e..22e8f0c 100644
--- a/mm/madvise.c
+++ b/mm/madvise.c
@@ -340,6 +340,8 @@ static int madvise_free_pte_range(pmd_t *pmd, unsigned long addr,
ptent = pte_mkold(ptent);
ptent = pte_mkclean(ptent);
set_pte_at(mm, addr, pte, ptent);
+ if (PageActive(page))
+ deactivate_page(page);
tlb_remove_tlb_entry(tlb, pte, addr);
}

diff --git a/mm/swap.c b/mm/swap.c
index 5b2a605..393968c 100644
--- a/mm/swap.c
+++ b/mm/swap.c
@@ -43,6 +43,7 @@ int page_cluster;
static DEFINE_PER_CPU(struct pagevec, lru_add_pvec);
static DEFINE_PER_CPU(struct pagevec, lru_rotate_pvecs);
static DEFINE_PER_CPU(struct pagevec, lru_deactivate_file_pvecs);
+static DEFINE_PER_CPU(struct pagevec, lru_deactivate_pvecs);

/*
* This path almost never happens for VM activity - pages are normally
@@ -789,6 +790,23 @@ static void lru_deactivate_file_fn(struct page *page, struct lruvec *lruvec,
update_page_reclaim_stat(lruvec, file, 0);
}

+
+static void lru_deactivate_fn(struct page *page, struct lruvec *lruvec,
+ void *arg)
+{
+ if (PageLRU(page) && PageActive(page) && !PageUnevictable(page)) {
+ int file = page_is_file_cache(page);
+ int lru = page_lru_base_type(page);
+
+ del_page_from_lru_list(page, lruvec, lru + LRU_ACTIVE);
+ ClearPageActive(page);
+ add_page_to_lru_list(page, lruvec, lru);
+
+ __count_vm_event(PGDEACTIVATE);
+ update_page_reclaim_stat(lruvec, file, 0);
+ }
+}
+
/*
* Drain pages out of the cpu's pagevecs.
* Either "cpu" is the current CPU, and preemption has already been
@@ -815,6 +833,10 @@ void lru_add_drain_cpu(int cpu)
if (pagevec_count(pvec))
pagevec_lru_move_fn(pvec, lru_deactivate_file_fn, NULL);

+ pvec = &per_cpu(lru_deactivate_pvecs, cpu);
+ if (pagevec_count(pvec))
+ pagevec_lru_move_fn(pvec, lru_deactivate_fn, NULL);
+
activate_page_drain(cpu);
}

@@ -844,6 +866,18 @@ void deactivate_file_page(struct page *page)
}
}

+void deactivate_page(struct page *page)
+{
+ if (PageLRU(page) && PageActive(page) && !PageUnevictable(page)) {
+ struct pagevec *pvec = &get_cpu_var(lru_deactivate_pvecs);
+
+ page_cache_get(page);
+ if (!pagevec_add(pvec, page))
+ pagevec_lru_move_fn(pvec, lru_deactivate_fn, NULL);
+ put_cpu_var(lru_deactivate_pvecs);
+ }
+}
+
void lru_add_drain(void)
{
lru_add_drain_cpu(get_cpu());
@@ -873,6 +907,7 @@ void lru_add_drain_all(void)
if (pagevec_count(&per_cpu(lru_add_pvec, cpu)) ||
pagevec_count(&per_cpu(lru_rotate_pvecs, cpu)) ||
pagevec_count(&per_cpu(lru_deactivate_file_pvecs, cpu)) ||
+ pagevec_count(&per_cpu(lru_deactivate_pvecs, cpu)) ||
need_activate_page_drain(cpu)) {
INIT_WORK(work, lru_add_drain_per_cpu);
schedule_work_on(cpu, work);
--
1.9.3