[PATCH -next 0/5] mm/mglru: remove memcg lru

Chen Ridong
2025-12-09T01:41:12Z

From: Chen Ridong <chenridong@huawei.com>

The memcg LRU was introduced to improve scalability in global reclaim,
but its implementation has grown complex and can cause performance
regressions when creating many memory cgroups [1].

This series implements mem_cgroup_iter with a reclaim cookie in
shrink_many() for global reclaim, following the pattern already used in
shrink_node_memcgs(), an approach suggested by Johannes [1]. The new
design maintains good fairness across cgroups by preserving iteration
state between reclaim passes.

Testing was performed using the original stress test from Yu Zhao [2] on a
1 TB, 4-node NUMA system. The results show:

pgsteal:
memcg LRU memcg iter
stddev(pgsteal) / mean(pgsteal) 106.03% 93.20%
sum(pgsteal) / sum(requested) 98.10% 99.28%

workingset_refault_anon:
memcg LRU memcg iter
stddev(refault) / mean(refault) 193.97% 134.67%
sum(refault) 1,963,229 2,027,567

The new implementation shows clear fairness improvements, reducing the
standard deviation relative to the mean by 12.8 percentage points for
pgsteal and bringing the pgsteal ratio closer to 100%. Refault counts
increased by 3.2% (from 1,963,229 to 2,027,567).

To simplify review:
1. Patch 1 uses mem_cgroup_iter with reclaim cookie in shrink_many()
2. Patch 2 removes the now-unused memcg LRU code
3. Patches 3–5 combine shrink_many and shrink_node_memcgs
(This reorganization is clearer after switching to mem_cgroup_iter)

---

Changes from RFC series:
1. Updated the test result data.
2. Added patches 3–5 to combine shrink_many and shrink_node_memcgs.

RFC: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20251204123124.1822965-1-chenridong@huaweicloud.com/

Chen Ridong (5):
mm/mglru: use mem_cgroup_iter for global reclaim
mm/mglru: remove memcg lru
mm/mglru: extend shrink_one for both lrugen and non-lrugen
mm/mglru: combine shrink_many into shrink_node_memcgs
mm/mglru: factor lrugen state out of shrink_lruvec

Documentation/mm/multigen_lru.rst | 30 ---
include/linux/mmzone.h | 89 --------
mm/memcontrol-v1.c | 6 -
mm/memcontrol.c | 4 -
mm/mm_init.c | 1 -
mm/vmscan.c | 332 ++++--------------------------
6 files changed, 44 insertions(+), 418 deletions(-)

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2.34.1