Re: [v2 RFC PATCH 0/9] Another Approach to Use PMEM as NUMA Node

[Dave Hansen]

On 4/17/19 2:23 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
>> 3. The demotion path can not have cycles
> yes. This could be achieved by GFP_NOWAIT opportunistic allocation for
> the migration target. That should prevent from loops or artificial nodes
> exhausting quite naturaly AFAICS. Maybe we will need some tricks to
> raise the watermark but I am not convinced something like that is really
> necessary.

I don't think GFP_NOWAIT alone is good enough.

Let's say we have a system full of clean page cache and only two nodes:
0 and 1.  GFP_NOWAIT will eventually kick off kswapd on both nodes.
Each kswapd will be migrating pages to the *other* node since each is in
the other's fallback path.

I think what you're saying is that, eventually, the kswapds will see
allocation failures and stop migrating, providing hysteresis.  This is
probably true.

But, I'm more concerned about that window where the kswapds are throwing
pages at each other because they're effectively just wasting resources
in this window.  I guess we should figure our how large this window is
and how fast (or if) the dampening occurs in practice.