linux-kernel - Re: [patch 0/5] refault distance-based file cache sizing

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Date:	Fri, 18 May 2012 11:44:39 +0800
From:	Nai Xia <nai.xia@...il.com>
To:	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>
CC:	linux-mm@...ck.org, Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
	Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@...il.com>,
	Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com>,
	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [patch 0/5] refault distance-based file cache sizing



On 2012/05/18 05:08, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 08:56:54PM +0800, nai.xia wrote:
>> On 2012/05/16 14:51, Johannes Weiner wrote:
>>> There may have been improvements from clock-pro, but it's hard to get
>>> code merged that does not behave as expected in theory with nobody
>>> understanding what's going on.
>
> Damn, that sounded way harsher and arrogant than I wanted it to sound.
> And it's only based on what I gathered from the discussions on the
> list archives.  Sorry :(

No harm done, man. I just understood your words in this way. :)

But I do think that Clock-pro deserves its credit, since after all
it's that research work firstly brought the idea of "refault/reuse
distance" to the kernel community. Further more, it's also good
to let the researchers and the community to together have some
brain-storm of this problem if it's really hard to deal with in
reality.

>
>> OK, I assume that you do aware that the system you constructed with
>> this simple and understandable idea looks like a so called "feedback
>> system"? Or in other words, I think theoretically the refault-distance
>> of a page before and after your algorithm is applied is not the same.
>> And this changed refault-distance pattern is then feed as input into
>> your algorithm. A feedback system may be hard(and may be simple) to
>> analyze but may also work well magically.
>
> I'm with you on that, but I can't see an alternative in this case.  We

I trend to agree, I once tried to deal with an anti-LRU pattern(e.g. the
big loop like you said) of a app from kernel space and failed. Seems
it's hard to gather a very accurate information of a program's real memory
footprint in mixed workloads with only the help of pte bits...(but also
may due to my lack of skills in tweaking the reclaiming code...)

> can't predict future page accesses very well, so we have to take
> speculative shots and be considerate about the consequences.
>
> And BECAUSE we may get it wrong, the algorithm does not rely on the
> decisions it makes to be correct.  For example, it does not activate
> pages based on refault distance, but requires the refaulted page to
> win the race against an actual active page.  Likewise, pages are not
> evicted from the active list directly, instead they get a chance at
> re-activation when challenged.

Yes. That sounds a smart handling.
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