Re: [PATCH v4 0/3] Ignore non-LRU-based reclaim in memcg reclaim

[Andrew Morton]

On Tue,  4 Apr 2023 00:13:50 +0000 Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Upon running some proactive reclaim tests using memory.reclaim, we
> noticed some tests flaking where writing to memory.reclaim would be
> successful even though we did not reclaim the requested amount fully.
> Looking further into it, I discovered that *sometimes* we over-report
> the number of reclaimed pages in memcg reclaim.
> 
> Reclaimed pages through other means than LRU-based reclaim are tracked
> through reclaim_state in struct scan_control, which is stashed in
> current task_struct. These pages are added to the number of reclaimed
> pages through LRUs. For memcg reclaim, these pages generally cannot be
> linked to the memcg under reclaim and can cause an overestimated count
> of reclaimed pages. This short series tries to address that.
> 
> Patches 1-2 are just refactoring, they add helpers that wrap some
> operations on current->reclaim_state, and rename
> reclaim_state->reclaimed_slab to reclaim_state->reclaimed.
> 
> Patch 3 ignores pages reclaimed outside of LRU reclaim in memcg reclaim.
> The pages are uncharged anyway, so even if we end up under-reporting
> reclaimed pages we will still succeed in making progress during
> charging.
> 
> Do not let the diff stat deceive you, the core of this series is patch 3,
> which has one line of code change. All the rest is refactoring and one
> huge comment.
> 

Wouldn't it be better to do this as a single one-line patch for
backportability?  Then all the refactoring etcetera can be added on
later.