linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/2] memcg: Allow guarantee reclaim

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Message-ID: <20140612142237.GB32720@dhcp22.suse.cz>
Date:	Thu, 12 Jun 2014 16:22:37 +0200
From:	Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.cz>
To:	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>
Cc:	Greg Thelen <gthelen@...gle.com>, Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@...fujitsu.com>,
	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com>,
	Michel Lespinasse <walken@...gle.com>,
	Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
	Roman Gushchin <klamm@...dex-team.ru>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] memcg: Allow guarantee reclaim

On Thu 12-06-14 09:56:00, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 03:22:07PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
[...]
> > Anyway, the situation now is pretty chaotic. I plan to gather all the
> > patchse posted so far and repost for the future discussion. I just need
> > to finish some internal tasks and will post it soon.
> 
> That would be great, thanks, it's really hard to follow this stuff
> halfway in and halfway outside of -mm.
> 
> Now that we roughly figured out what knobs and semantics we want, it
> would be great to figure out the merging logistics.
> 
> I would prefer if we could introduce max, high, low, min in unified
> hierarchy, and *only* in there, so that we never have to worry about
> it coexisting and interacting with the existing hard and soft limit.

The primary question would be, whether this is is the best transition
strategy. I do not know how many users apart from developers are really
using unified hierarchy. I would be worried that we merge a feature which
will not be used for a long time.

Moreover, if somebody wants to transition from soft limit then it would
be really hard because switching to unified hierarchy might be a no-go.

I think that it is clear that we should deprecate soft_limit ASAP. I
also think it wont't hurt to have min, low, high in both old and unified
API and strongly warn if somebody tries to use soft_limit along with any
of the new APIs in the first step. Later we can even forbid any
combination by a hard failure.

> It would also be beneficial to introduce them all close to each other,
> develop them together, possibly submit them in the same patch series,
> so that we know the requirements and how the code should look like in
> the big picture and can offer a fully consistent and documented usage
> model in the unified hierarchy.

Min and Low should definitely go together. High sounds like an
orthogonal problem (pro-active reclaim vs reclaim protection) so I think
it can go its own way and pace. We still have to discuss its semantic
and I feel it would be a bit disturbing to have everything in one
bundle. 
I do understand your point about the global picture, though. Do you
think that there is a risk that formulating semantic for High limit
might change the way how Min and Low would be defined?

> Does that make sense?

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
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