Re: [PATCH RFC] mm/vmscan: try to protect active working set of cgroup from reclaim.

[Vlastimil Babka]

On 2/22/19 6:58 PM, Andrey Ryabinin wrote:
> In a presence of more than 1 memory cgroup in the system our reclaim
> logic is just suck. When we hit memory limit (global or a limit on
> cgroup with subgroups) we reclaim some memory from all cgroups.
> This is sucks because, the cgroup that allocates more often always wins.
> E.g. job that allocates a lot of clean rarely used page cache will push
> out of memory other jobs with active relatively small all in memory
> working set.
> 
> To prevent such situations we have memcg controls like low/max, etc which
> are supposed to protect jobs or limit them so they to not hurt others.
> But memory cgroups are very hard to configure right because it requires
> precise knowledge of the workload which may vary during the execution.
> E.g. setting memory limit means that job won't be able to use all memory
> in the system for page cache even if the rest the system is idle.
> Basically our current scheme requires to configure every single cgroup
> in the system.
> 
> I think we can do better. The idea proposed by this patch is to reclaim
> only inactive pages and only from cgroups that have big
> (!inactive_is_low()) inactive list. And go back to shrinking active lists
> only if all inactive lists are low.

Perhaps going this direction could also make page cache side-channel
attacks harder?
Quoting [1]:

"On Linux, we are only able
to evict pages efficiently because we can trick the page re-
placement algorithm into believing our target page would be
the best choice for eviction. The reason for this lies in the
fact that Linux uses a global page replacement algorithm,
i.e., an algorithm which does not distinguish between dif-
ferent processes. Global page replacement algorithms have
been known for decades to allow one process to perform a
denial-of-service on other processes"

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01161