mm: base LRU balancing on an explicit cost model
Currently, scan pressure between the anon and file LRU lists is balanced
based on a mixture of reclaim efficiency and a somewhat vague notion of
"value" of having certain pages in memory over others. That concept of
value is problematic, because it has caused us to count any event that
remotely makes one LRU list more or less preferrable for reclaim, even
when these events are not directly comparable and impose very different
costs on the system. One example is referenced file pages that we still
deactivate and referenced anonymous pages that we actually rotate back to
the head of the list.
There is also conceptual overlap with the LRU algorithm itself. By
rotating recently used pages instead of reclaiming them, the algorithm
already biases the applied scan pressure based on page value. Thus, when
rebalancing scan pressure due to rotations, we should think of reclaim
cost, and leave assessing the page value to the LRU algorithm.
Lastly, considering both value-increasing as well as value-decreasing
events can sometimes cause the same type of event to be counted twice,
i.e. how rotating a page increases the LRU value, while reclaiming it
succesfully decreases the value. In itself this will balance out fine,
but it quietly skews the impact of events that are only recorded once.
The abstract metric of "value", the murky relationship with the LRU
algorithm, and accounting both negative and positive events make the
current pressure balancing model hard to reason about and modify.
This patch switches to a balancing model of accounting the concrete,
actually observed cost of reclaiming one LRU over another. For now, that
cost includes pages that are scanned but rotated back to the list head.
Subsequent patches will add consideration for IO caused by refaulting of
recently evicted pages.
Replace struct zone_reclaim_stat with two cost counters in the lruvec, and
make everything that affects cost go through a new lru_note_cost()
function.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200520232525.798933-9-hannes@cmpxchg.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
5 files changed
