Re: [PATCH 2/2] memcg: do not drain charge pcp caches on remote isolated cpus

[Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 6:44 AM Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
>
> Leonardo Bras has noticed that pcp charge cache draining might be
> disruptive on workloads relying on 'isolated cpus', a feature commonly
> used on workloads that are sensitive to interruption and context
> switching such as vRAN and Industrial Control Systems.
>
> There are essentially two ways how to approach the issue. We can either
> allow the pcp cache to be drained on a different rather than a local cpu
> or avoid remote flushing on isolated cpus.
>
> The current pcp charge cache is really optimized for high performance
> and it always relies to stick with its cpu. That means it only requires
> local_lock (preempt_disable on !RT) and draining is handed over to pcp
> WQ to drain locally again.
>
> The former solution (remote draining) would require to add an additional
> locking to prevent local charges from racing with the draining. This
> adds an atomic operation to otherwise simple arithmetic fast path in the
> try_charge path. Another concern is that the remote draining can cause a
> lock contention for the isolated workloads and therefore interfere with
> it indirectly via user space interfaces.
>
> Another option is to avoid draining scheduling on isolated cpus
> altogether. That means that those remote cpus would keep their charges
> even after drain_all_stock returns. This is certainly not optimal either
> but it shouldn't really cause any major problems. In the worst case
> (many isolated cpus with charges - each of them with MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH
> i.e 64 page) the memory consumption of a memcg would be artificially
> higher than can be immediately used from other cpus.
>
> Theoretically a memcg OOM killer could be triggered pre-maturely.
> Currently it is not really clear whether this is a practical problem
> though. Tight memcg limit would be really counter productive to cpu
> isolated workloads pretty much by definition because any memory
> reclaimed induced by memcg limit could break user space timing
> expectations as those usually expect execution in the userspace most of
> the time.
>
> Also charges could be left behind on memcg removal. Any future charge on
> those isolated cpus will drain that pcp cache so this won't be a
> permanent leak.
>
> Considering cons and pros of both approaches this patch is implementing
> the second option and simply do not schedule remote draining if the
> target cpu is isolated. This solution is much more simpler. It doesn't
> add any new locking and it is more more predictable from the user space
> POV. Should the pre-mature memcg OOM become a real life problem, we can
> revisit this decision.
>
> Cc: Leonardo Brás <leobras@redhat.com>
> Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
> Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
> Cc: Muchun Song <muchun.song@linux.dev>
> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
> Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
> Reported-by: Leonardo Bras <leobras@redhat.com>
> Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>
> Suggested-by: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>
> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>

Acked-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>