[RFC v2 14/14] Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon: Add a document for DAMON_RECLAIM

[SeongJae Park]

From: SeongJae Park <sjpark@xxxxxxxxx>

This commit adds an admin-guide document for DAMON-based Reclamation.

Signed-off-by: SeongJae Park <sjpark@xxxxxxxxx>
---
 Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon/index.rst  |   1 +
 .../admin-guide/mm/damon/reclaim.rst          | 211 ++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 212 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon/reclaim.rst

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon/index.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon/index.rst
index 0baae7a5402b..e5b4da13f60b 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon/index.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon/index.rst
@@ -13,3 +13,4 @@ Using this, users can analyze and optimize their systems.
    start
    guide
    usage
+   reclaim
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon/reclaim.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon/reclaim.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..b4fe0c16f72e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/damon/reclaim.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,211 @@
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+=======================
+DAMON-based Reclamation
+=======================
+
+DAMON-based Reclamation (DAMON_RECLAIM) is a static kernel module that aimed to
+be used for proactive and lightweight reclamation under light memory pressure.
+It doesn't aim to replace the LRU-list based page_granularity reclamation, but
+to be selectively used for different level of memory pressure and requirements.
+
+Where Proactive Reclamation is Required?
+========================================
+
+On general memory over-committed systems, proactively reclaiming cold pages
+helps saving memory and reducing latency spikes that incurred by the direct
+reclaim of the process or CPU consumption of kswapd, while incurring only
+minimal performance degradation [1]_ [2]_ .
+
+Free Pages Reporting [3]_ based memory over-commit virtualization systems are
+good example of the cases.  In such systems, the guest VMs reports their free
+memory to host, and the host reallocates the reported memory to other guests.
+As a result, the memory of the systems are fully utilized.  However, the
+guests could be not so memory-frugal, mainly because some kernel subsystems and
+user-space applications are designed to use as much memory as available.  Then,
+guests could report only small amount of memory as free to host, results in
+memory utilization drop of the systems.  Running the proactive reclamation in
+guests could mitigate this problem.
+
+How It Works?
+=============
+
+DAMON_RECLAIM finds memory regions that didn't accessed for specific time
+duration and page out.  To avoid it consuming too much CPU for the paging out
+operation, a speed limit can be configured.  Under the speed limit, it pages
+out memory regions that didn't accessed longer time first.  System
+administrators can also configure under what situation this scheme should
+automatically activated and deactivated with three memory pressure watermarks.
+
+Interface: Module Parameters
+============================
+
+To use this feature, you should first ensure your system is running on a kernel
+that is built with ``CONFIG_DAMON_RECLAIM=y``.
+
+To let sysadmins enable or disable it and tune for the given system,
+DAMON_RECLAIM utilizes module parameters.  That is, you can put
+``damon_reclaim.<parameter>=<value>`` on the kernel boot command line or write
+proper values to ``/sys/modules/damon_reclaim/parameters/<parameter>`` files.
+
+Note that the parameter values except ``enabled`` are applied only when
+DAMON_RECLAIM starts.  Therefore, if you want to apply new parameter values in
+runtime and DAMON_RECLAIM is already enabled, you should disable and re-enable
+it via ``enabled`` parameter file.  Writing of the new values to proper
+parameter values should be done before the re-enablement.
+
+Below are the description of each parameter.
+
+enabled
+-------
+
+Enable or disable DAMON_RECLAIM.
+
+You can enable DAMON_RCLAIM by setting the value of this parameter as ``Y``.
+Setting it as ``N`` disables DAMON_RECLAIM.  Note that DAMON_RECLAIM could do
+no real monitoring and reclamation due to the watermarks-based activation
+condition.  Refer to below descriptions for the watermarks parameter for this.
+
+min_age
+-------
+
+Time threshold for cold memory regions identification in microseconds.
+
+If a memory region is not accessed for this or longer time, DAMON_RECLAIM
+identifies the region as cold, and reclaims it.
+
+limit_sz
+--------
+
+Maximum bytes of memory that can be reclaimed in a charging window.
+
+DAMON_RECLAIM counts amount of memory which has reclaimed within current
+charging time window and avoids reclaiming more than this limit in current time
+window.  This could be useful for limiting CPU consumption of DAMON_RECLAIM.
+
+limit_ms
+--------
+
+The reclaimed memory charging window in milliseconds.
+
+wmarks_interval
+---------------
+
+Minimal time to wait before checking the watermarks, when DAMON_RECLAIM is
+enabled but inactive due to its watermarks rule.
+
+wmarks_high
+-----------
+
+Free memory rate (per thousand) for the high watermark.
+
+If free memory of the system in bytes per thousand bytes is higher than this,
+DAMON_RECLAIM becomes inactive, so it does nothing but only periodically checks
+the watermarks.
+
+wmarks_mid
+----------
+
+Free memory rate (per thousand) for the middle watermark.
+
+If free memory of the system in bytes per thousand bytes is between this and
+the low watermark, DAMON_RECLAIM becomes active, so starts the monitoring and
+the reclaiming.
+
+wmarks_low
+----------
+
+Free memory rate (per thousand) for the low watermark.
+
+If free memory of the system in bytes per thousand bytes is lower than this,
+DAMON_RECLAIM becomes inactive, so it does nothing but periodically checks the
+watermarks.  In the case, the system falls back to the LRU-list based page
+granularity reclamation logic.
+
+sample_interval
+---------------
+
+Sampling interval for the monitoring in microseconds.
+
+The sampling interval of DAMON for the cold memory monitoring.  Please refer to
+the DAMON documentation (:doc:`usage`) for more detail.
+
+aggr_interval
+-------------
+
+Aggregation interval for the monitoring in microseconds.
+
+The aggregation interval of DAMON for the cold memory monitoring.  Please
+refer to the DAMON documentation (:doc:`usage`) for more detail.
+
+min_nr_regions
+--------------
+
+Minimum number of monitoring regions.
+
+The minimal number of monitoring regions of DAMON for the cold memory
+monitoring.  This can be used to set lower-bound of the monitoring quality.
+But, setting this too high could result in increased monitoring overhead.
+Please refer to the DAMON documentation (:doc:`usage`) for more detail.
+
+max_nr_regions
+--------------
+
+Maximum number of monitoring regions.
+
+The maximum number of monitoring regions of DAMON for the cold memory
+monitoring.  This can be used to set upper-bound of the monitoring overhead.
+However, setting this too low could result in bad monitoring quality.  Please
+refer to the DAMON documentation (:doc:`usage`) for more detail.
+
+monitor_region_start
+--------------------
+
+Start of target memory region in physical address.
+
+The start physical address of memory region that DAMON_RECLAIM will do work
+against.  That is, DAMON_RECLAIM will find cold memory regions in this region
+and reclaims.  By default, biggest System RAM is used as the region.
+
+monitor_region_end
+------------------
+
+End of target memory region in physical address.
+
+The end physical address of memory region that DAMON_RECLAIM will do work
+against.  That is, DAMON_RECLAIM will find cold memory regions in this region
+and reclaims.  By default, biggest System RAM is used as the region.
+
+kdamond_pid
+-----------
+
+PID of the DAMON thread.
+
+If DAMON_RECLAIM is enabled, this becomes the PID of the worker thread.  Else,
+-1.
+
+Example
+=======
+
+Below runtime example commands make DAMON_RECLAIM to find memory regions that
+not accessed for 30 seconds or more and pages out.  The reclamation is limited
+to be done only up to 1 GiB per second to avoid DAMON_RECLAIM consuming too
+much CPU time for the paging out operation.  It also asks DAMON_RECLAIM to do
+nothing if the system's free memory rate is more than 50%, but start the real
+works if it becomes lower than 40%.  If DAMON_RECLAIM doesn't make progress and
+therefore the free memory rate becomes lower than 20%, it asks DAMON_RECLAIM to
+do nothing again, so that we can fall back to the LRU-list based page
+granularity reclamation. ::
+
+    # cd /sys/modules/damon_reclaim/parameters
+    # echo 30000000 > min_age
+    # echo $((1 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024)) > limit_sz
+    # echo 1000 > limit_ms
+    # echo 500 > wmarks_high
+    # echo 400 > wmarks_mid
+    # echo 200 > wmarks_low
+    # echo Y > enabled
+
+.. [1] https://research.google/pubs/pub48551/
+.. [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/787611/
+.. [3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/vm/free_page_reporting.html
-- 
2.17.1