Re: [PATCH v2] mm/vmscan: shrink slab in node reclaim

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Tue 06-08-19 17:54:02, Yafang Shao wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 5:50 PM Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 06, 2019 at 11:25:31AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > On Tue 06-08-19 17:15:05, Yafang Shao wrote:
> > > > On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 5:05 PM Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > > > > As you said, the direct reclaim path set it to 1, but the
> > > > > > __node_reclaim() forgot to process may_shrink_slab.
> > > > >
> > > > > OK, I am blind obviously. Sorry about that. Anyway, why cannot we simply
> > > > > get back to the original behavior by setting may_shrink_slab in that
> > > > > path as well?
> > > >
> > > > You mean do it as the commit 0ff38490c836 did  before ?
> > > > I haven't check in which commit the shrink_slab() is removed from
> > >
> > > What I've had in mind was essentially this:
> > >
> > > diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
> > > index 7889f583ced9..8011288a80e2 100644
> > > --- a/mm/vmscan.c
> > > +++ b/mm/vmscan.c
> > > @@ -4088,6 +4093,7 @@ static int __node_reclaim(struct pglist_data *pgdat, gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned in
> > >               .may_unmap = !!(node_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_UNMAP),
> > >               .may_swap = 1,
> > >               .reclaim_idx = gfp_zone(gfp_mask),
> > > +             .may_shrinkslab = 1;
> > >       };
> > >
> > >       trace_mm_vmscan_node_reclaim_begin(pgdat->node_id, order,
> > >
> > > shrink_node path already does shrink slab when the flag allows that. In
> > > other words get us back to before 1c30844d2dfe because that has clearly
> > > changed the long term node reclaim behavior just recently.
> >
> > I'd be fine with this change. It was not intentional to significantly
> > change the behaviour of node reclaim in that patch.
> >
> 
> But if we do it like this, there will be bug in the knob vm.min_slab_ratio.
> Right ?

Yes, and the answer for that is a question why do we even care? Which
real life workload does suffer from the of min_slab_ratio misbehavior.
Also it is much more preferred to fix an obvious bug/omission which
lack of may_shrinkslab in node reclaim seem to be than a larger rewrite
with a harder to see changes.

Really, I wouldn't be opposing normally but node_reclaim is an odd ball
rarely used and changing its behavior based on some trivial testing
doesn't sound very convincing to me.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs