Re: [PATCH] mm: vmpressure: don't count userspace-induced reclaim as memory pressure

From: Shakeel Butt
Date: Thu Jun 23 2022 - 12:43:11 EST


On Thu, Jun 23, 2022 at 9:37 AM Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu 23-06-22 09:22:35, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 23, 2022 at 2:43 AM Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu 23-06-22 01:35:59, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> [...]
> > > > In our internal version of memory.reclaim that we recently upstreamed,
> > > > we do not account vmpressure during proactive reclaim (similar to how
> > > > psi is handled upstream). We want to make sure this behavior also
> > > > exists in the upstream version so that consolidating them does not
> > > > break our users who rely on vmpressure and will start seeing increased
> > > > pressure due to proactive reclaim.
> > >
> > > These are good reasons to have this patch in your tree. But why is this
> > > patch benefitial for the upstream kernel? It clearly adds some code and
> > > some special casing which will add a maintenance overhead.
> >
> > It is not just Google, any existing vmpressure users will start seeing
> > false pressure notifications with memory.reclaim. The main goal of the
> > patch is to make sure memory.reclaim does not break pre-existing users
> > of vmpressure, and doing it in a way that is consistent with psi makes
> > sense.
>
> memory.reclaim is v2 only feature which doesn't have vmpressure
> interface. So I do not see how pre-existing users of the upstream kernel
> can see any breakage.
>

Please note that vmpressure is still being used in v2 by the
networking layer (see mem_cgroup_under_socket_pressure()) for
detecting memory pressure.

Though IMO we should deprecate vmpressure altogether.