NUMA balancing: optimize page placement for memory tiering system

With the advent of various new memory types, some machines will have
multiple types of memory, e.g.  DRAM and PMEM (persistent memory).  The
memory subsystem of these machines can be called memory tiering system,
because the performance of the different types of memory are usually
different.

In such system, because of the memory accessing pattern changing etc,
some pages in the slow memory may become hot globally.  So in this
patch, the NUMA balancing mechanism is enhanced to optimize the page
placement among the different memory types according to hot/cold
dynamically.

In a typical memory tiering system, there are CPUs, fast memory and slow
memory in each physical NUMA node.  The CPUs and the fast memory will be
put in one logical node (called fast memory node), while the slow memory
will be put in another (faked) logical node (called slow memory node).
That is, the fast memory is regarded as local while the slow memory is
regarded as remote.  So it's possible for the recently accessed pages in
the slow memory node to be promoted to the fast memory node via the
existing NUMA balancing mechanism.

The original NUMA balancing mechanism will stop to migrate pages if the
free memory of the target node becomes below the high watermark.  This
is a reasonable policy if there's only one memory type.  But this makes
the original NUMA balancing mechanism almost do not work to optimize
page placement among different memory types.  Details are as follows.

It's the common cases that the working-set size of the workload is
larger than the size of the fast memory nodes.  Otherwise, it's
unnecessary to use the slow memory at all.  So, there are almost always
no enough free pages in the fast memory nodes, so that the globally hot
pages in the slow memory node cannot be promoted to the fast memory
node.  To solve the issue, we have 2 choices as follows,

a. Ignore the free pages watermark checking when promoting hot pages
   from the slow memory node to the fast memory node.  This will
   create some memory pressure in the fast memory node, thus trigger
   the memory reclaiming.  So that, the cold pages in the fast memory
   node will be demoted to the slow memory node.

b. Define a new watermark called wmark_promo which is higher than
   wmark_high, and have kswapd reclaiming pages until free pages reach
   such watermark.  The scenario is as follows: when we want to promote
   hot-pages from a slow memory to a fast memory, but fast memory's free
   pages would go lower than high watermark with such promotion, we wake
   up kswapd with wmark_promo watermark in order to demote cold pages and
   free us up some space.  So, next time we want to promote hot-pages we
   might have a chance of doing so.

The choice "a" may create high memory pressure in the fast memory node.
If the memory pressure of the workload is high, the memory pressure
may become so high that the memory allocation latency of the workload
is influenced, e.g.  the direct reclaiming may be triggered.

The choice "b" works much better at this aspect.  If the memory
pressure of the workload is high, the hot pages promotion will stop
earlier because its allocation watermark is higher than that of the
normal memory allocation.  So in this patch, choice "b" is implemented.
A new zone watermark (WMARK_PROMO) is added.  Which is larger than the
high watermark and can be controlled via watermark_scale_factor.

In addition to the original page placement optimization among sockets,
the NUMA balancing mechanism is extended to be used to optimize page
placement according to hot/cold among different memory types.  So the
sysctl user space interface (numa_balancing) is extended in a backward
compatible way as follow, so that the users can enable/disable these
functionality individually.

The sysctl is converted from a Boolean value to a bits field.  The
definition of the flags is,

- 0: NUMA_BALANCING_DISABLED
- 1: NUMA_BALANCING_NORMAL
- 2: NUMA_BALANCING_MEMORY_TIERING

We have tested the patch with the pmbench memory accessing benchmark
with the 80:20 read/write ratio and the Gauss access address
distribution on a 2 socket Intel server with Optane DC Persistent
Memory Model.  The test results shows that the pmbench score can
improve up to 95.9%.

Thanks Andrew Morton to help fix the document format error.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220221084529.1052339-3-ying.huang@intel.com
Signed-off-by: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
Tested-by: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com>
Reviewed-by: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Yang Shi <shy828301@gmail.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
Cc: Wei Xu <weixugc@google.com>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Cc: zhongjiang-ali <zhongjiang-ali@linux.alibaba.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Cc: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 9 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/kernel.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/kernel.rst
index d359bcfadd39..fdfd2b684822 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/kernel.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/kernel.rst
@@ -595,16 +595,23 @@ Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.rst).
 numa_balancing
 ==============
 
-Enables/disables automatic page fault based NUMA memory
-balancing. Memory is moved automatically to nodes
-that access it often.
+Enables/disables and configures automatic page fault based NUMA memory
+balancing.  Memory is moved automatically to nodes that access it often.
+The value to set can be the result of ORing the following:
 
-Enables/disables automatic NUMA memory balancing. On NUMA machines, there
-is a performance penalty if remote memory is accessed by a CPU. When this
-feature is enabled the kernel samples what task thread is accessing memory
-by periodically unmapping pages and later trapping a page fault. At the
-time of the page fault, it is determined if the data being accessed should
-be migrated to a local memory node.
+= =================================
+0 NUMA_BALANCING_DISABLED
+1 NUMA_BALANCING_NORMAL
+2 NUMA_BALANCING_MEMORY_TIERING
+= =================================
+
+Or NUMA_BALANCING_NORMAL to optimize page placement among different
+NUMA nodes to reduce remote accessing.  On NUMA machines, there is a
+performance penalty if remote memory is accessed by a CPU. When this
+feature is enabled the kernel samples what task thread is accessing
+memory by periodically unmapping pages and later trapping a page
+fault. At the time of the page fault, it is determined if the data
+being accessed should be migrated to a local memory node.
 
 The unmapping of pages and trapping faults incur additional overhead that
 ideally is offset by improved memory locality but there is no universal
@@ -615,6 +622,10 @@ faults may be controlled by the `numa_balancing_scan_period_min_ms,
 numa_balancing_scan_delay_ms, numa_balancing_scan_period_max_ms,
 numa_balancing_scan_size_mb`_, and numa_balancing_settle_count sysctls.
 
+Or NUMA_BALANCING_MEMORY_TIERING to optimize page placement among
+different types of memory (represented as different NUMA nodes) to
+place the hot pages in the fast memory.  This is implemented based on
+unmapping and page fault too.
 
 numa_balancing_scan_period_min_ms, numa_balancing_scan_delay_ms, numa_balancing_scan_period_max_ms, numa_balancing_scan_size_mb
 ===============================================================================================================================