linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 3/4] mm: move lazy free pages to inactive list

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Date:	Fri, 20 Mar 2015 15:43:58 -0700
From:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.cz>,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
	Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>, Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
	Shaohua Li <shli@...nel.org>, Yalin.Wang@...ymobile.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/4] mm: move lazy free pages to inactive list

On Wed, 11 Mar 2015 10:20:37 +0900 Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org> wrote:

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

lru_deactivate_file_fn() and deactivate_file_page() are carefully
documented and lru_deactivate_fn() and deactivate_page() should
be as well.  In fact it becomes more important now that we have two
similar-looking things.


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