mm: vmscan: enforce inactive:active ratio at the reclaim root

We split the LRU lists into inactive and an active parts to maximize
workingset protection while allowing just enough inactive cache space to
faciltate readahead and writeback for one-off file accesses (e.g.  a
linear scan through a file, or logging); or just enough inactive anon to
maintain recent reference information when reclaim needs to swap.

With cgroups and their nested LRU lists, we currently don't do this
correctly.  While recursive cgroup reclaim establishes a relative LRU
order among the pages of all involved cgroups, inactive:active size
decisions are done on a per-cgroup level.  As a result, we'll reclaim a
cgroup's workingset when it doesn't have cold pages, even when one of its
siblings has plenty of it that should be reclaimed first.

For example: workload A has 50M worth of hot cache but doesn't do any
one-off file accesses; meanwhile, parallel workload B scans files and
rarely accesses the same page twice.

If these workloads were to run in an uncgrouped system, A would be
protected from the high rate of cache faults from B.  But if they were put
in parallel cgroups for memory accounting purposes, B's fast cache fault
rate would push out the hot cache pages of A.  This is unexpected and
undesirable - the "scan resistance" of the page cache is broken.

This patch moves inactive:active size balancing decisions to the root of
reclaim - the same level where the LRU order is established.

It does this by looking at the recursive size of the inactive and the
active file sets of the cgroup subtree at the beginning of the reclaim
cycle, and then making a decision - scan or skip active pages - that
applies throughout the entire run and to every cgroup involved.

With that in place, in the test above, the VM will recognize that there
are plenty of inactive pages in the combined cache set of workloads A and
B and prefer the one-off cache in B over the hot pages in A.  The scan
resistance of the cache is restored.

[cai@lca.pw: fix some -Wenum-conversion warnings]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1573848697-29262-1-git-send-email-cai@lca.pw
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20191107205334.158354-4-hannes@cmpxchg.org
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@virtuozzo.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mmzone.h b/include/linux/mmzone.h
index ddee00e91a22..d9e62b0b584e 100644
--- a/include/linux/mmzone.h
+++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h
@@ -273,12 +273,12 @@ enum lru_list {
 
 #define for_each_evictable_lru(lru) for (lru = 0; lru <= LRU_ACTIVE_FILE; lru++)
 
-static inline int is_file_lru(enum lru_list lru)
+static inline bool is_file_lru(enum lru_list lru)
 {
 	return (lru == LRU_INACTIVE_FILE || lru == LRU_ACTIVE_FILE);
 }
 
-static inline int is_active_lru(enum lru_list lru)
+static inline bool is_active_lru(enum lru_list lru)
 {
 	return (lru == LRU_ACTIVE_ANON || lru == LRU_ACTIVE_FILE);
 }