Re: [PATCH] mm/percpu, memcontrol: Per-memcg-lruvec percpu accounting

[Joshua Hahn <joshua.hahnjy@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:35:38 -0700 Yosry Ahmed <yosry@kernel.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 7:21 AM Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon 30-03-26 07:10:10, Joshua Hahn wrote:
> > > On Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:03:29 +0200 Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Fri 27-03-26 12:19:35, Joshua Hahn wrote:
> > > > > Convert MEMCG_PERCPU_B from a memcg_stat_item to a memcg_node_stat_item
> > > > > to give visibility into per-node breakdowns for percpu allocations and
> > > > > turn it into NR_PERCPU_B.
> > > >
> > > > Why do we need/want this?
> > >
> > > Hello Michal,
> > >
> > > Thank you for reviewing my patch! I hope you are doing well.
> > >
> > > You're right, I could have done a better job of motivating the patch.
> > > My intent with this patch is to give some more visibility into where
> > > memory is physically, once you know which memcg it is in.
> >
> > Please keep in mind that WHY is very often much more important than HOW
> > in the patch so you should always start with the intention and
> > justification.
> >
> > > Percpu memory could probably be seen as "trivial" when it comes to figuring
> > > out what node it is on, but I'm hoping to make similar transitions to the
> > > rest of enum memcg_stat_item as well (you can see my work for the zswap
> > > stats in [1]).
> > >
> > > When all of the memory is moved from being tracked per-memcg to per-lruvec,
> > > then the final vision would be able to attribute node placement within
> > > each memcg, which can help with diagnosing things like asymmetric node
> > > pressure within a memcg, which is currently only partially accurate.
> > >
> > > Getting per-node breakdowns of percpu memory orthogonal to memcgs also
> > > seems like a win to me. While unlikely, I think that we can benefit from
> > > some amount of visibility into whether percpu allocations are happening
> > > equally across all CPUs.
> > >
> > > What do you think? Thank you again, I hope you have a great day!
> >
> > I think that you should have started with this intended outcome first
> > rather than slicing it in pieces. Why do we want to shift to per-node
> > stats for other/all counters? What is the cost associated comparing to the
> > existing accounting (if any)? Please go into details on how do you plan
> > to use the data before we commit into a lot of code churn.
> >
> > TBH I do not see any fundamental reasons why this would be impossible
> > but I am not really sure this is worth the work and I also do not see
> > potential subtle issues that we might stumble over when getting there.
> > So I would appreciate if you could have a look into that deeper and
> > provide us with evaluation on how do you want to achieve your end goal
> > and what can we expect on the way. It is, of course, impossible to see
> > all potential problems without starting implementing the thing but a
> > high level evaluation would be really helpful.
> 
> You should probably also speak to extra memory overhead to move all
> these stats from per-memcg to per-lruvec.

Hello Yosry,

Thank you for your feedback!

Here are the things that I cna see from my end:
- NR_PERCPU_B adds a byte per-node, per-cpu. I think this is manageable.
- lruvec_stats_percpu grows by 1 long in 2 arrays (state, state_prev) since
  NR_MEMCG_NODE_STAT_ITEMS grows by 1 from ~30. This is +16 bytes per
  cgroup x node x CPU. Even still, I'm not sure this is too concerning,
  on a host with 300 CPUs across 2 nodes with 100 cgroups (theoretical)
  we would see a 16 * 300 * 2 * 100 = 937 kB change, less than a mB (and
  I think this would be considered a big machine).

What do you think? Do these numbers look acceptable?

Thanks again for your insights, I hope you have a great day : -)
Joshua