Re: [PATCH v4 4/5] page_idle: Drain all LRU pagevec before idle tracking

On Tue 06-08-19 06:45:54, Joel Fernandes wrote:

On Tue, Aug 06, 2019 at 10:43:57AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:

quoted

On Mon 05-08-19 13:04:50, Joel Fernandes (Google) wrote:

quoted

During idle tracking, we see that sometimes faulted anon pages are in
pagevec but are not drained to LRU. Idle tracking considers pages only
on LRU. Drain all CPU's LRU before starting idle tracking.

Please expand on why does this matter enough to introduce a potentially
expensinve draining which has to schedule a work on each CPU and wait
for them to finish.

Sure, I can expand. I am able to find multiple issues involving this. One
issue looks like idle tracking is completely broken. It shows up in my
testing as if a page that is marked as idle is always "accessed" -- because
it was never marked as idle (due to not draining of pagevec).

The other issue shows up as a failure in my "swap test", with the following
sequence:
1. Allocate some pages
2. Write to them
3. Mark them as idle                                    <--- fails
4. Introduce some memory pressure to induce swapping.
5. Check the swap bit I introduced in this series.      <--- fails to set idle
                                                             bit in swap PTE.

Draining the pagevec in advance fixes both of these issues.

This belongs to the changelog.

This operation even if expensive is only done once during the access of the
page_idle file. Did you have a better fix in mind?

Can we set the idle bit also for non-lru pages as long as they are
reachable via pte?
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs