Date:   Fri, 13 Jul 2018 08:33:27 +0800
From:   Wei Wang <wei.w.wang@...el.com>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
CC:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        virtio-dev@...ts.oasis-open.org,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        virtualization <virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org>,
        KVM list <kvm@...r.kernel.org>, linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
        liliang.opensource@...il.com, yang.zhang.wz@...il.com,
        quan.xu0@...il.com, nilal@...hat.com,
        Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>, peterx@...hat.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v35 1/5] mm: support to get hints of free page blocks

On 07/12/2018 07:49 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Thu 12-07-18 19:34:16, Wei Wang wrote:
>> On 07/12/2018 04:13 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>> On Thu 12-07-18 10:52:08, Wei Wang wrote:
>>>> On 07/12/2018 10:30 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 7:17 PM Wei Wang <wei.w.wang@...el.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Would it be better to remove __GFP_THISNODE? We actually want to get all
>>>>>> the guest free pages (from all the nodes).
>>>>> Maybe. Or maybe it would be better to have the memory balloon logic be
>>>>> per-node? Maybe you don't want to remove too much memory from one
>>>>> node? I think it's one of those "play with it" things.
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't think that's the big issue, actually. I think the real issue
>>>>> is how to react quickly and gracefully to "oops, I'm trying to give
>>>>> memory away, but now the guest wants it back" while you're in the
>>>>> middle of trying to create that 2TB list of pages.
>>>> OK. virtio-balloon has already registered an oom notifier
>>>> (virtballoon_oom_notify). I plan to add some control there. If oom happens,
>>>> - stop the page allocation;
>>>> - immediately give back the allocated pages to mm.
>>> Please don't. Oom notifier is an absolutely hideous interface which
>>> should go away sooner or later (I would much rather like the former) so
>>> do not build a new logic on top of it. I would appreciate if you
>>> actually remove the notifier much more.
>>>
>>> You can give memory back from the standard shrinker interface. If we are
>>> reaching low reclaim priorities then we are struggling to reclaim memory
>>> and then you can start returning pages back.
>> OK. Just curious why oom notifier is thought to be hideous, and has it been
>> a consensus?
> Because it is a completely non-transparent callout from the OOM context
> which is really subtle on its own. It is just too easy to end up in
> weird corner cases. We really have to be careful and be as swift as
> possible. Any potential sleep would make the OOM situation much worse
> because nobody would be able to make a forward progress or (in)direct
> dependency on MM subsystem can easily deadlock. Those are really hard
> to track down and defining the notifier as blockable by design which
> just asks for bad implementations because most people simply do not
> realize how subtle the oom context is.
>
> Another thing is that it happens way too late when we have basically
> reclaimed the world and didn't get out of the memory pressure so you can
> expect any workload is suffering already. Anybody sitting on a large
> amount of reclaimable memory should have released that memory by that
> time. Proportionally to the reclaim pressure ideally.
>
> The notifier API is completely unaware of oom constrains. Just imagine
> you are OOM in a subset of numa nodes. Callback doesn't have any idea
> about that.
>
> Moreover we do have proper reclaim mechanism that has a feedback
> loop and that should be always preferable to an abrupt reclaim.

Sounds very reasonable, thanks for the elaboration. I'll try with shrinker.

Best,
Wei

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