Date:	Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:35:56 +1100
From:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...nel.dk>
To:	Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
Cc:	npiggin@...nel.dk, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [patch 31/35] fs: icache per-zone inode LRU

[I should have cc'ed this one to linux-mm as well, so I quote your
reply in full here]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 11:38:52PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 02:42:47PM +1100, npiggin@...nel.dk wrote:
> > Per-zone LRUs and shrinkers for inode cache.
> 
> Regardless of whether this is the right way to scale or not, I don't
> like the fact that this moves the cache LRUs into the memory
> management structures, and expands the use of MM specific structures
> throughout the code.

The zone structure really is the basic unit of memory abstraction
in the whole zoned VM concept (which covers different properties
of both physical address and NUMA cost).

The zone contains structures for memory management that aren't
otherwise directly related to one another. Generic page waitqueues,
page allocator structures, pagecache reclaim structures, memory model
data, and various statistics.

Structures to reclaim inodes from a particular zone belong in the
zone struct as much as those to reclaim pagecache or anonymous
memory from that zone too. It actually fits far better in here than
globally, because all our allocation/reclaiming/watermarks etc is
driven per-zone.

The structure is not frequent -- a couple per NUMA node.


> It ties the cache implementation to the current
> VM implementation. That, IMO, goes against all the principle of
> modularisation at the source code level, and it means we have to tie
> all shrinker implemenations to the current internal implementation
> of the VM. I don't think that is wise thing to do because of the
> dependencies and impedance mismatches it introduces.

It's very fundamental. We allocate memory from, and have to reclaim
memory from -- zones. Memory reclaim is driven based on how the VM
wants to reclaim memory: nothing you can do to avoid some linkage
between the two.

Look at it this way. The dumb global shrinker is also tied to an
MM implementation detail, but that detail in fact does *not* match
the reality of the MM, and so it has all these problems interacting
with real reclaim.

What problems? OK, on an N zone system (assuming equal zones and
even distribution of objects around memory), then if there is a shortage
on a particular zone, slabs from _all_ zones are reclaimed. We reclaim
a factor of N too many objects. In a NUMA situation, we also touch
remote memory with a chance (N-1)/N.

As number of nodes grow beyond 2, this quickly goes down hill.

In summary, there needs to be some knowledge of how MM reclaims memory
in memory reclaim shrinkers -- simply can't do a good implementation
without that. If the zone concept changes, the MM gets turned upside
down and all those assumptions would need to be revisited anyway.


> As an example: XFS inodes to be reclaimed are simply tagged in a
> radix tree so the shrinker can reclaim inodes in optimal IO order
> rather strict LRU order. It simply does not match a zone-based

This is another problem, similar to what we have in pagecache. In
the pagecache, we need to clean pages in optimal IO order, but we
still reclaim them according to some LRU order.

If you reclaim them in optimal IO order, cache efficiency will go
down because you sacrifice recency/frequency information. If you
IO in reclaim order, IO efficiency goes down. The solution is to
decouple them with like writeout versus reclaim.

But anyway, that's kind of an "aside": inode caches are reclaimed
in LRU, IO-suboptimal order today anyway. Per-zone LRU doesn't
change that in the slightest.

> shrinker implementation in any way, shape or form, nor does it's
> inherent parallelism match that of the way shrinkers are called.
> 
> Any change in shrinker infrastructure needs to be able to handle
> these sorts of impedance mismatches between the VM and the cache
> subsystem. The current API doesn't handle this very well, either,
> so it's something that we need to fix so that scalability is easy
> for everyone.
> 
> Anyway, my main point is that tying the LRU and shrinker scaling to
> the implementation of the VM is a one-off solution that doesn't work
> for generic infrastructure.

No it isn't. It worked for the pagecache, and it works for dcache.


> Other subsystems need the same
> large-machine scaling treatment, and there's no way we should be
> tying them all into the struct zone. It needs further abstraction.

An abstraction? Other than the zone? What do you suggest? Invent
something that the VM has no concept of and try to use that?

No. The zone is the right thing to base it on.

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