mm: deactivations shouldn't bias the LRU balance
authorJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Wed, 3 Jun 2020 23:02:57 +0000 (16:02 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Thu, 4 Jun 2020 03:09:49 +0000 (20:09 -0700)
commitfbbb602e40c270e884bc545161b238074b20aaae
tree1bc77bef25b685d15b767199996047c0a593b0b0
parent1431d4d11abb265e79cd44bed2f5ea93f1bcc57b
mm: deactivations shouldn't bias the LRU balance

Operations like MADV_FREE, FADV_DONTNEED etc.  currently move any affected
active pages to the inactive list to accelerate their reclaim (good) but
also steer page reclaim toward that LRU type, or away from the other
(bad).

The reason why this is undesirable is that such operations are not part of
the regular page aging cycle, and rather a fluke that doesn't say much
about the remaining pages on that list; they might all be in heavy use,
and once the chunk of easy victims has been purged, the VM continues to
apply elevated pressure on those remaining hot pages.  The other LRU,
meanwhile, might have easily reclaimable pages, and there was never a need
to steer away from it in the first place.

As the previous patch outlined, we should focus on recording actually
observed cost to steer the balance rather than speculating about the
potential value of one LRU list over the other.  In that spirit, leave
explicitely deactivated pages to the LRU algorithm to pick up, and let
rotations decide which list is the easiest to reclaim.

[cai@lca.pw: fix set-but-not-used warning]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200522133335.GA624@Qians-MacBook-Air.local
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Cc: Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200520232525.798933-10-hannes@cmpxchg.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm/swap.c