[Ksummit-2012-discuss] [ATTEND] Easy-Reclaimable LRU list

[Minchan Kim]

Hello,

I would like to attend KS2012.

These days I'm focussed on page allocation/reclaim to reduce latency when the memory pressure happens.
Recently, there are some efforts to handle system memory pressure.

1) low memory notification - [1]
2) fallocate(VOLATILE) - [2]
3) fadvise(NOREUSE) - [3]

For them, I would like to add new LRU list, aka "Ereclaimable" which is opposite of "unevictable".
Reclaimable LRU list includes _easy_ reclaimable pages.
For example, easy reclaimable pages are following as.

1. invalidated but remained LRU list.
2. pageout pages for reclaim(PG_reclaim pages)
3. fadvise(NOREUSE)
4. fallocate(VOLATILE)

Their pages shouldn't stir normal LRU list and compaction might not need migrate them, even.
Reclaimer can reclaim Ereclaimable pages before normal lru list and will avoid unnecessary
swapout in anon pages in easy-reclaimable LRU list.
It also can make admin measure how many we have available pages which are those we can get without big latency
at the moment.
It's very important in recent mobile systems because page reclaim/writeback is very critical
of application latency. Of course, it could affect normal desktop, too.
With it, we can calculate pages we can get immediately more exactly with NR_FREE_PAGES + NR_ERECLAIMABLE_PAGES,
for example. If it's below threshold user defined, we might trigger 1st level notification if we really want to prototype low memory notification.

We may change madvise(DONTNEED) implementation instead of zapping page immediately.
If memory pressure doesn't happen, pages are in memory so we can avoid so many minor fault.
Of course, we can discard instead of swap out if system memory pressure happens.
We might implement it madvise(VOLATILE) instead of DONTNEED, but anyway it's off-topic.

As a another example, we can implement CFLRU(Clean-First LRU) which reclaims unmapped-clean cache page firstly.
The rationale is that in non-rotation device, read/write cost is much asynchronous.
Read is very fast while write is very slow so it would be a gain while we can avoid writeback of dirty pages
if possible although we need several reads. It can be implemented easily with Ereclaimable pages, too.
As a side effect, we can remain dirty pages long time in LRU without pageout and it would be good for
write bandwidth, too. I guess many mm/fs guys who want to avoid writeback in reclaim path have an interest. 

I would also like to attend in the memcg writeback discussion proposed by Fengguang and 
Memory management discussion by Johannes Weiner.

Thanks!

[1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/1/97
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/1/322
[3] https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/6/24/136

-- 
Kind regards,
Minchan Kim