linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: disable LRU pagevec during the migration temporarily

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Date:   Thu, 4 Mar 2021 09:07:28 +0100
From:   David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>
To:     Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>, Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, joaodias@...gle.com,
        surenb@...gle.com, cgoldswo@...eaurora.org, willy@...radead.org,
        vbabka@...e.cz, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: disable LRU pagevec during the migration
 temporarily

On 03.03.21 21:23, Minchan Kim wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 01:49:36PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
>> On Tue 02-03-21 13:09:48, Minchan Kim wrote:
>>> LRU pagevec holds refcount of pages until the pagevec are drained.
>>> It could prevent migration since the refcount of the page is greater
>>> than the expection in migration logic. To mitigate the issue,
>>> callers of migrate_pages drains LRU pagevec via migrate_prep or
>>> lru_add_drain_all before migrate_pages call.
>>>
>>> However, it's not enough because pages coming into pagevec after the
>>> draining call still could stay at the pagevec so it could keep
>>> preventing page migration. Since some callers of migrate_pages have
>>> retrial logic with LRU draining, the page would migrate at next trail
>>> but it is still fragile in that it doesn't close the fundamental race
>>> between upcoming LRU pages into pagvec and migration so the migration
>>> failure could cause contiguous memory allocation failure in the end.
>>>
>>> To close the race, this patch disables lru caches(i.e, pagevec)
>>> during ongoing migration until migrate is done.
>>>
>>> Since it's really hard to reproduce, I measured how many times
>>> migrate_pages retried with force mode below debug code.
>>>
>>> int migrate_pages(struct list_head *from, new_page_t get_new_page,
>>> 			..
>>> 			..
>>>
>>> if (rc && reason == MR_CONTIG_RANGE && pass > 2) {
>>>         printk(KERN_ERR, "pfn 0x%lx reason %d\n", page_to_pfn(page), rc);
>>>         dump_page(page, "fail to migrate");
>>> }
>>>
>>> The test was repeating android apps launching with cma allocation
>>> in background every five seconds. Total cma allocation count was
>>> about 500 during the testing. With this patch, the dump_page count
>>> was reduced from 400 to 30.
>>
>> Have you seen any improvement on the CMA allocation success rate?
> 
> Unfortunately, the cma alloc failure rate with reasonable margin
> of error is really hard to reproduce under real workload.
> That's why I measured the soft metric instead of direct cma fail
> under real workload(I don't want to make some adhoc artificial
> benchmark and keep tunes system knobs until it could show
> extremly exaggerated result to convice patch effect).
> 
> Please say if you belive this work is pointless unless there is
> stable data under reproducible scenario. I am happy to drop it.

Do you have *some* application that triggers such a high retry count?

I'd love to run it along with virtio-mem and report the actual 
allocation success rate / necessary retries. That could give an 
indication of how helpful your work would be.

Anything that improves the reliability of alloc_contig_range() is of 
high interest to me. If it doesn't increase the reliability but merely 
does some internal improvements (less retries), it might still be 
valuable, but not that important.

-- 
Thanks,

David / dhildenb