mm: move lazily freed pages to inactive list

MADV_FREE is a hint that it's okay to discard pages if there is memory
pressure and we use reclaimers(ie, kswapd and direct reclaim) to free
them so there is no value keeping them in the active anonymous LRU so
this patch moves them to inactive LRU list's head.

This means that MADV_FREE-ed pages which were living on the inactive
list are reclaimed first because they are more likely to be cold rather
than recently active pages.

An arguable issue for the approach would be whether we should put the
page to the head or tail of the inactive list.  I chose head because the
kernel cannot make sure it's really cold or warm for every MADV_FREE
usecase but at least we know it's not *hot*, so landing of inactive head
would be a comprimise for various usecases.

This fixes suboptimal behavior of MADV_FREE when pages living on the
active list will sit there for a long time even under memory pressure
while the inactive list is reclaimed heavily.  This basically breaks the
whole purpose of using MADV_FREE to help the system to free memory which
is might not be used.

Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: "James E.J. Bottomley" <jejb@parisc-linux.org>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: <yalin.wang2010@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Cc: Chen Gang <gang.chen.5i5j@gmail.com>
Cc: Chris Zankel <chris@zankel.net>
Cc: Daniel Micay <danielmicay@gmail.com>
Cc: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Cc: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru>
Cc: Jason Evans <je@fb.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: Matt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com>
Cc: Max Filippov <jcmvbkbc@gmail.com>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: Mika Penttil <mika.penttila@nextfour.com>
Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Cc: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
Cc: Roland Dreier <roland@kernel.org>
Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/madvise.c b/mm/madvise.c
index 98e28e777ccb..4e9454622801 100644
--- a/mm/madvise.c
+++ b/mm/madvise.c
@@ -368,6 +368,8 @@ static int madvise_free_pte_range(pmd_t *pmd, unsigned long addr,
 			ptent = pte_mkold(ptent);
 			ptent = pte_mkclean(ptent);
 			set_pte_at(mm, addr, pte, ptent);
+			if (PageActive(page))
+				deactivate_page(page);
 			tlb_remove_tlb_entry(tlb, pte, addr);
 		}
 	}