Re: [HELP] How to get task_struct from mm

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Thu May 30 2019 - 11:45:01 EST


On Thu 30-05-19 14:57:46, Yang Shi wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
>
> As what we discussed about page demotion for PMEM at LSF/MM, the demotion
> should respect to the mempolicy and allowed mems of the process which the
> page (anonymous page only for now) belongs to.

cpusets memory mask (aka mems_allowed) is indeed tricky and somehow
awkward. It is inherently an address space property and I never
understood why we have it per _thread_. This just doesn't make any
sense to me. This just leads to weird corner cases. What should happen
if different threads disagree about the allocation affinity while
working on a shared address space?

> The vma that the page is mapped to can be retrieved from rmap walk easily,
> but we need know the task_struct that the vma belongs to. It looks there is
> not such API, and container_of seems not work with pointer member.

I do not think this is a good idea. As you point out in the reply we
have that for memcgs but we really hope to get rid of mm->owner there
as well. It is just more tricky there. Moreover such a reverse mapping
would be incorrect. Just think of a disagreeing yet overlapping cpusets
for different threads mapping the same page.

Is it such a big deal to document that the node migrate is not
compatible with cpusets?
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs