Date:   Tue, 10 May 2022 12:34:20 -0700
From:   Yang Shi <shy828301@...il.com>
To:     CGEL <cgel.zte@...il.com>
Cc:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@...ux.dev>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@...gle.com>,
        Miaohe Lin <linmiaohe@...wei.com>,
        William Kucharski <william.kucharski@...cle.com>,
        Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>, Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        Muchun Song <songmuchun@...edance.com>,
        Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        Cgroups <cgroups@...r.kernel.org>,
        Yang Yang <yang.yang29@....com.cn>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm/memcg: support control THP behaviour in cgroup

On Mon, May 9, 2022 at 6:43 PM CGEL <cgel.zte@...il.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 09, 2022 at 01:48:39PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Mon 09-05-22 11:26:43, CGEL wrote:
> > > On Mon, May 09, 2022 at 12:00:28PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > > On Sat 07-05-22 02:05:25, CGEL wrote:
> > > > [...]
> > > > > If there are many containers to run on one host, and some of them have high
> > > > > performance requirements, administrator could turn on thp for them:
> > > > > # docker run -it --thp-enabled=always
> > > > > Then all the processes in those containers will always use thp.
> > > > > While other containers turn off thp by:
> > > > > # docker run -it --thp-enabled=never
> > > >
> > > > I do not know. The THP config space is already too confusing and complex
> > > > and this just adds on top. E.g. is the behavior of the knob
> > > > hierarchical? What is the policy if parent memcg says madivise while
> > > > child says always? How does the per-application configuration aligns
> > > > with all that (e.g. memcg policy madivise but application says never via
> > > > prctl while still uses some madvised - e.g. via library).
> > > >
> > >
> > > The cgroup THP behavior is align to host and totally independent just likes
> > > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory.swappiness. That means if one cgroup config 'always'
> > > for thp, it has no matter with host or other cgroup. This make it simple for
> > > user to understand or control.
> >
> > All controls in cgroup v2 should be hierarchical. This is really
> > required for a proper delegation semantic.
> >
>
> Could we align to the semantic of /sys/fs/cgroup/memory.swappiness?
> Some distributions like Ubuntu is still using cgroup v1.

Other than enable flag, how would you handle the defrag flag
hierarchically? It is much more complicated.

>
> > > If memcg policy madivise but application says never, just like host, the result
> > > is no THP for that application.
> > >
> > > > > By doing this we could promote important containers's performance with less
> > > > > footprint of thp.
> > > >
> > > > Do we really want to provide something like THP based QoS? To me it
> > > > sounds like a bad idea and if the justification is "it might be useful"
> > > > then I would say no. So you really need to come with a very good usecase
> > > > to promote this further.
> > >
> > > At least on some 5G(communication technology) machine, it's useful to provide
> > > THP based QoS. Those 5G machine use micro-service software architecture, in
> > > other words one service application runs in one container.
> >
> > I am not really sure I understand. If this is one application per
> > container (cgroup) then why do you really need per-group setting?
> > Does the application is a set of different processes which are only very
> > loosely tight?
> >
> For micro-service architecture, the application in one container is not a
> set of loosely tight processes, it's aim at provide one certain service,
> so different containers means different service, and different service
> has different QoS demand.
>
> The reason why we need per-group(per-container) setting is because most
> container are managed by compose software, the compose software provide
> UI to decide how to run a container(likes setting swappiness value). For
> example the docker compose:
> https://docs.docker.com/compose/#compose-v2-and-the-new-docker-compose-command
>
> To make it clearer, I try to make a summary for why container needs this patch:
>     1.one machine can run different containers;
>     2.for some scenario, container runs only one service inside(can be only one
> application);
>     3.different containers provide different services, different services have
> different QoS demands;
>     4.THP has big influence on QoS. It's fast for memory access, but eat more
> memory;

I have been involved in this kind of topic discussion offline a couple
of times. But TBH I don't see how you could achieve QoS by this flag.
THP allocation is *NOT* guaranteed. And the overhead may be quite
high. It depends on how fragmented the system is.

>     5.containers usually managed by compose software, which treats container as
> base management unit;
>     6.this patch provide cgroup THP controller, which can be a method to adjust
> container memory QoS.
>
> > > Container becomes
> > > the suitable management unit but not the whole host. And some performance
> > > sensitive containers desiderate THP to provide low latency communication.
> > > But if we use THP with 'always', it will consume more memory(on our machine
> > > that is about 10% of total memory). And unnecessary huge pages will increase
> > > memory pressure, add latency for minor pages faults, and add overhead when
> > > splitting huge pages or coalescing normal sized pages into huge pages.
> >
> > It is still not really clear to me how do you achieve that the whole
> > workload in the said container has the same THP requirements.
> > --
> > Michal Hocko
> > SUSE Labs

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