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Shakeel Butt 9b3016154c memcg: sync flush only if periodic flush is delayed
Daniel Dao has reported [1] a regression on workloads that may trigger a
lot of refaults (anon and file).  The underlying issue is that flushing
rstat is expensive.  Although rstat flush are batched with (nr_cpus *
MEMCG_BATCH) stat updates, it seems like there are workloads which
genuinely do stat updates larger than batch value within short amount of
time.  Since the rstat flush can happen in the performance critical
codepaths like page faults, such workload can suffer greatly.

This patch fixes this regression by making the rstat flushing
conditional in the performance critical codepaths.  More specifically,
the kernel relies on the async periodic rstat flusher to flush the stats
and only if the periodic flusher is delayed by more than twice the
amount of its normal time window then the kernel allows rstat flushing
from the performance critical codepaths.

Now the question: what are the side-effects of this change? The worst
that can happen is the refault codepath will see 4sec old lruvec stats
and may cause false (or missed) activations of the refaulted page which
may under-or-overestimate the workingset size.  Though that is not very
concerning as the kernel can already miss or do false activations.

There are two more codepaths whose flushing behavior is not changed by
this patch and we may need to come to them in future.  One is the
writeback stats used by dirty throttling and second is the deactivation
heuristic in the reclaim.  For now keeping an eye on them and if there
is report of regression due to these codepaths, we will reevaluate then.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/CA+wXwBSyO87ZX5PVwdHm-=dBjZYECGmfnydUicUyrQqndgX2MQ@mail.gmail.com [1]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220304184040.1304781-1-shakeelb@google.com
Fixes: 1f828223b7 ("memcg: flush lruvec stats in the refault")
Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Reported-by: Daniel Dao <dqminh@cloudflare.com>
Tested-by: Ivan Babrou <ivan@cloudflare.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Koutný <mkoutny@suse.com>
Cc: Frank Hofmann <fhofmann@cloudflare.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2022-04-21 20:01:09 -07:00
arch Xtensa fixes for v5.18: 2022-04-20 12:43:27 -07:00
block block: don't print I/O error warning for dead disks 2022-04-15 06:33:03 -06:00
certs Kbuild updates for v5.18 2022-03-31 11:59:03 -07:00
crypto for-5.18/64bit-pi-2022-03-25 2022-03-26 12:01:35 -07:00
Documentation Changes since last update: 2022-04-20 12:35:20 -07:00
drivers spi: Fixes for v5.18 2022-04-19 10:30:43 -07:00
fs Changes since last update: 2022-04-20 12:35:20 -07:00
include memcg: sync flush only if periodic flush is delayed 2022-04-21 20:01:09 -07:00
init Kbuild updates for v5.18 2022-03-31 11:59:03 -07:00
ipc fs: allocate inode by using alloc_inode_sb() 2022-03-22 15:57:03 -07:00
kernel A small set of fixes for the timers core: 2022-04-17 09:53:01 -07:00
lib Driver core changes for 5.18-rc2 2022-04-10 09:55:09 -10:00
LICENSES LICENSES/LGPL-2.1: Add LGPL-2.1-or-later as valid identifiers 2021-12-16 14:33:10 +01:00
mm memcg: sync flush only if periodic flush is delayed 2022-04-21 20:01:09 -07:00
net Networking fixes for 5.18-rc3, including fixes from wireless and 2022-04-14 11:58:19 -07:00
samples dma-mapping updates for Linux 5.18 2022-03-29 08:50:14 -07:00
scripts hardening fixes for v5.18-rc3 2022-04-12 14:29:40 -10:00
security hardening updates for v5.18-rc1-fix1 2022-03-31 11:43:01 -07:00
sound sound fixes for 5.18-rc3 2022-04-14 11:08:12 -07:00
tools Two x86 fixes related to TSX: 2022-04-17 09:55:59 -07:00
usr Kbuild updates for v5.18 2022-03-31 11:59:03 -07:00
virt KVM/arm64 fixes for 5.18, take #1 2022-04-08 12:30:04 -04:00
.clang-format genirq/msi: Make interrupt allocation less convoluted 2021-12-16 22:22:20 +01:00
.cocciconfig
.get_maintainer.ignore Opt out of scripts/get_maintainer.pl 2019-05-16 10:53:40 -07:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: use 'dts' diff driver for dts files 2019-12-04 19:44:11 -08:00
.gitignore .gitignore: ignore only top-level modules.builtin 2021-05-02 00:43:35 +09:00
.mailmap mailmap: update Vasily Averin's email address 2022-04-08 14:20:36 -10:00
COPYING COPYING: state that all contributions really are covered by this file 2020-02-10 13:32:20 -08:00
CREDITS MAINTAINERS: replace a Microchip AT91 maintainer 2022-02-09 11:30:01 +01:00
Kbuild kbuild: rename hostprogs-y/always to hostprogs/always-y 2020-02-04 01:53:07 +09:00
Kconfig kbuild: ensure full rebuild when the compiler is updated 2020-05-12 13:28:33 +09:00
MAINTAINERS ARM: SoC fixes for 5.18, part 2 2022-04-16 16:51:39 -07:00
Makefile Linux 5.18-rc3 2022-04-17 13:57:31 -07:00
README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.