Re: [PATCH v5 1/6] mm/page_idle: Add per-pid idle page tracking using virtual index

[Joel Fernandes]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 04:14:32PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
[snip] 
> > > If the API is flawed then this is likely going
> > > to kick us later and will be hard to fix. I am still not convinced about
> > > the swap part of the thing TBH.
> > 
> > Ok, then let us discuss it. As I mentioned before, without this we lose the
> > access information due to MADVISE or swapping. Minchan and Konstantin both
> > suggested it that's why I also added it (other than me also realizing that it
> > is neeed).
> 
> I have described my concerns about the general idle bit behavior after
> unmapping pointing to discrepancy with !anon pages. And I believe those
> haven't been addressed yet.

You are referring to this post right?
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/6/637

Specifically your question was:
How are you going to handle situation when the page is unmapped  and refaulted again (e.g. a normal reclaim of a pagecache)?

Currently I don't know how to implement that. Would it work if I stored the
page-idle bit information in the pte of the file page (after the page is
unmapped by reclaim?).

Also, this could be a future extension - the Android heap profiler does not
need it right now. I know that's not a good argument but it is useful to say
that it doesn't affect a real world usecase.. the swap issue on the other
hand, is a real usecase. Since the profiler should not get affected by
swapping or MADVISE_COLD hints.

> Besides that I am still not seeing any
> description of the usecase that would suffer from the lack of the
> functionality in changelogs.

You are talking about the swap usecase? The usecase is well layed out in v5
2/6. Did you see it? https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/1112283/

thanks,

 - Joel