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Johannes Weiner 96f8bf4fb1 mm: vmscan: reclaim writepage is IO cost
The VM tries to balance reclaim pressure between anon and file so as to
reduce the amount of IO incurred due to the memory shortage.  It already
counts refaults and swapins, but in addition it should also count
writepage calls during reclaim.

For swap, this is obvious: it's IO that wouldn't have occurred if the
anonymous memory hadn't been under memory pressure.  From a relative
balancing point of view this makes sense as well: even if anon is cold and
reclaimable, a cache that isn't thrashing may have equally cold pages that
don't require IO to reclaim.

For file writeback, it's trickier: some of the reclaim writepage IO would
have likely occurred anyway due to dirty expiration.  But not all of it -
premature writeback reduces batching and generates additional writes.
Since the flushers are already woken up by the time the VM starts writing
cache pages one by one, let's assume that we'e likely causing writes that
wouldn't have happened without memory pressure.  In addition, the per-page
cost of IO would have probably been much cheaper if written in larger
batches from the flusher thread rather than the single-page-writes from
kswapd.

For our purposes - getting the trend right to accelerate convergence on a
stable state that doesn't require paging at all - this is sufficiently
accurate.  If we later wanted to optimize for sustained thrashing, we can
still refine the measurements.

Count all writepage calls from kswapd as IO cost toward the LRU that the
page belongs to.

Why do this dynamically?  Don't we know in advance that anon pages require
IO to reclaim, and so could build in a static bias?

First, scanning is not the same as reclaiming.  If all the anon pages are
referenced, we may not swap for a while just because we're scanning the
anon list.  During this time, however, it's important that we age
anonymous memory and the page cache at the same rate so that their
hot-cold gradients are comparable.  Everything else being equal, we still
want to reclaim the coldest memory overall.

Second, we keep copies in swap unless the page changes.  If there is
swap-backed data that's mostly read (tmpfs file) and has been swapped out
before, we can reclaim it without incurring additional IO.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200520232525.798933-14-hannes@cmpxchg.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2020-06-03 20:09:49 -07:00
Documentation mm: allow swappiness that prefers reclaiming anon over the file workingset 2020-06-03 20:09:48 -07:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Rename other to deprecated 2019-05-03 06:34:32 -06:00
arch mm/hugetlb: define a generic fallback for arch_clear_hugepage_flags() 2020-06-03 20:09:46 -07:00
block for-5.8/drivers-2020-06-01 2020-06-02 15:37:03 -07:00
certs .gitignore: add SPDX License Identifier 2020-03-25 11:50:48 +01:00
crypto crypto: engine - do not requeue in case of fatal error 2020-05-28 17:27:52 +10:00
drivers drm/i915: convert get_user_pages() --> pin_user_pages() 2020-06-03 20:09:42 -07:00
fs mm: fold and remove lru_cache_add_anon() and lru_cache_add_file() 2020-06-03 20:09:48 -07:00
include mm: vmscan: reclaim writepage is IO cost 2020-06-03 20:09:49 -07:00
init mm: memcontrol: make swap tracking an integral part of memory control 2020-06-03 20:09:48 -07:00
ipc ipc/util.c: sysvipc_find_ipc() incorrectly updates position index 2020-05-14 10:00:35 -07:00
kernel mm: allow swappiness that prefers reclaiming anon over the file workingset 2020-06-03 20:09:48 -07:00
lib kasan: stop tests being eliminated as dead code with FORTIFY_SOURCE 2020-06-03 20:09:42 -07:00
mm mm: vmscan: reclaim writepage is IO cost 2020-06-03 20:09:49 -07:00
net audit/stable-5.8 PR 20200601 2020-06-02 17:13:37 -07:00
samples Merge branch 'from-miklos' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2020-06-01 16:44:06 -07:00
scripts A fair amount of stuff this time around, dominated by yet another massive 2020-06-01 15:45:27 -07:00
security Merge branch 'next-general' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jmorris/linux-security 2020-06-02 17:36:24 -07:00
sound Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew) 2020-06-02 12:21:36 -07:00
tools khugepaged: introduce 'max_ptes_shared' tunable 2020-06-03 20:09:46 -07:00
usr kbuild: fix comment about missing include guard detection 2020-04-11 12:09:48 +09:00
virt A fair amount of stuff this time around, dominated by yet another massive 2020-06-01 15:45:27 -07:00
.clang-format block: add bio_for_each_bvec_all() 2020-05-25 11:25:24 +02:00
.cocciconfig
.get_maintainer.ignore Opt out of scripts/get_maintainer.pl 2019-05-16 10:53:40 -07:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: use 'dts' diff driver for dts files 2019-12-04 19:44:11 -08:00
.gitignore .gitignore: add SPDX License Identifier 2020-03-25 11:50:48 +01:00
.mailmap A fair amount of stuff this time around, dominated by yet another massive 2020-06-01 15:45:27 -07:00
COPYING COPYING: state that all contributions really are covered by this file 2020-02-10 13:32:20 -08:00
CREDITS mailmap: change email for Ricardo Ribalda 2020-05-25 18:59:59 -06:00
Kbuild kbuild: rename hostprogs-y/always to hostprogs/always-y 2020-02-04 01:53:07 +09:00
Kconfig docs: kbuild: convert docs to ReST and rename to *.rst 2019-06-14 14:21:21 -06:00
MAINTAINERS for-5.8/drivers-2020-06-01 2020-06-02 15:37:03 -07:00
Makefile arm64 updates for 5.8 2020-06-01 15:18:27 -07:00
README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

README

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.