04 Apr, 2014
2 commits
-
Previously, page cache radix tree nodes were freed after reclaim emptied
out their page pointers. But now reclaim stores shadow entries in their
place, which are only reclaimed when the inodes themselves are
reclaimed. This is problematic for bigger files that are still in use
after they have a significant amount of their cache reclaimed, without
any of those pages actually refaulting. The shadow entries will just
sit there and waste memory. In the worst case, the shadow entries will
accumulate until the machine runs out of memory.To get this under control, the VM will track radix tree nodes
exclusively containing shadow entries on a per-NUMA node list. Per-NUMA
rather than global because we expect the radix tree nodes themselves to
be allocated node-locally and we want to reduce cross-node references of
otherwise independent cache workloads. A simple shrinker will then
reclaim these nodes on memory pressure.A few things need to be stored in the radix tree node to implement the
shadow node LRU and allow tree deletions coming from the list:1. There is no index available that would describe the reverse path
from the node up to the tree root, which is needed to perform a
deletion. To solve this, encode in each node its offset inside the
parent. This can be stored in the unused upper bits of the same
member that stores the node's height at no extra space cost.2. The number of shadow entries needs to be counted in addition to the
regular entries, to quickly detect when the node is ready to go to
the shadow node LRU list. The current entry count is an unsigned
int but the maximum number of entries is 64, so a shadow counter
can easily be stored in the unused upper bits.3. Tree modification needs tree lock and tree root, which are located
in the address space, so store an address_space backpointer in the
node. The parent pointer of the node is in a union with the 2-word
rcu_head, so the backpointer comes at no extra cost as well.4. The node needs to be linked to an LRU list, which requires a list
head inside the node. This does increase the size of the node, but
it does not change the number of objects that fit into a slab page.[akpm@linux-foundation.org: export the right function]
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli
Cc: Bob Liu
Cc: Christoph Hellwig
Cc: Dave Chinner
Cc: Greg Thelen
Cc: Hugh Dickins
Cc: Jan Kara
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro
Cc: Luigi Semenzato
Cc: Mel Gorman
Cc: Metin Doslu
Cc: Michel Lespinasse
Cc: Ozgun Erdogan
Cc: Peter Zijlstra
Cc: Roman Gushchin
Cc: Ryan Mallon
Cc: Tejun Heo
Cc: Vlastimil Babka
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds -
The VM maintains cached filesystem pages on two types of lists. One
list holds the pages recently faulted into the cache, the other list
holds pages that have been referenced repeatedly on that first list.
The idea is to prefer reclaiming young pages over those that have shown
to benefit from caching in the past. We call the recently usedbut
ultimately was not significantly better than a FIFO policy and still
thrashed cache based on eviction speed, rather than actual demand for
cache.This patch solves one half of the problem by decoupling the ability to
detect working set changes from the inactive list size. By maintaining
a history of recently evicted file pages it can detect frequently used
pages with an arbitrarily small inactive list size, and subsequently
apply pressure on the active list based on actual demand for cache, not
just overall eviction speed.Every zone maintains a counter that tracks inactive list aging speed.
When a page is evicted, a snapshot of this counter is stored in the
now-empty page cache radix tree slot. On refault, the minimum access
distance of the page can be assessed, to evaluate whether the page
should be part of the active list or not.This fixes the VM's blindness towards working set changes in excess of
the inactive list. And it's the foundation to further improve the
protection ability and reduce the minimum inactive list size of 50%.Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim
Reviewed-by: Bob Liu
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli
Cc: Christoph Hellwig
Cc: Dave Chinner
Cc: Greg Thelen
Cc: Hugh Dickins
Cc: Jan Kara
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro
Cc: Luigi Semenzato
Cc: Mel Gorman
Cc: Metin Doslu
Cc: Michel Lespinasse
Cc: Ozgun Erdogan
Cc: Peter Zijlstra
Cc: Roman Gushchin
Cc: Ryan Mallon
Cc: Tejun Heo
Cc: Vlastimil Babka
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds
