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

[Yosry Ahmed]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2022 at 6:07 PM Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2022 at 10:04 AM Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 27, 2022 at 5:31 AM Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> [...]
> > >
> > > I can see clear arguments for memory.reclaim opt out for vmpressure
> > > because we have established that this is not a measure to express a
> > > memory pressure on the cgroup.
> > >
> > > Max/High are less clear to me, TBH. I do understand reasoning for PSI
> > > exclusion because considering the calling process to be stalled and
> > > non-productive is misleading. It just does its work so in a way it is
> > > a productive time in the end. For the vmpressure, which measures how
> > > hard/easy it is to reclaim memory why this should special for this
> > > particular reclaim?
> > >
> > > Again, an explanation of the effect on the socket pressure could give a
> > > better picture. Say that I somebody reduces the limit (hard/high) and it
> > > takes quite some effort to shrink the consumption down. Should the
> > > networking layer react to that in any way or should it wait for the
> > > active allocation during that process to find that out?
> >
> > I am out of my depth here. Any answer on my side would be purely
> > speculation at this point. Shakeel, can you help us here or tag some
> > networking people?
>
> So, the effect of returning true from mem_cgroup_under_socket_pressure() are:
>
> 1. Reducing send and receive buffers of the current socket.
> 2. May drop packets on the rx path.
> 3. May throttle current thread on the tx path.
>
> Now regarding the behavior from the reclaim due to reducing max or
> high, I think the kernel should not ignore vmpressure. Please note
> that unlike PSI which is associated with the current process,
> vmpressure is associated with the target memcg. So, any reclaim on
> that memcg due to real shortage of memory should not be ignored. That
> reclaim can be global reclaim or limit reclaim of ancestor or itself
> or reclaim due to lowering the limit of ancestor or itself.

So it seems like we should only ignore vmpressure for proactive
reclaim (aka memory.reclaim).

Michal, let me know what you think here, I can drop psi and
limit-setting changes in v3 and basically just ignore vmpressure for
memory.reclaim (MEMCG_RECLAIM_PROACTIVE / sc->proactive instead of
MEMCG_RECLAIM_CONTROLLED / sc->controlled maybe).