Re: [PATCH v2 6/6] mm: zswap: interrupt shrinker writeback while pagein/out IO

[Takero Funaki <flintglass@gmail.com>]

2024年7月11日(木) 7:10 Nhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com>:

> > > Yet another (less concerning IMHO) scenario is when a cgroup disables
> > > zswap by setting zswap.max = 0 (for instance, if the sysadmin knows
> > > that this cgroup's data are really cold, and/or that the workload is
> > > latency-tolerant, and do not want it to take up valuable memory
> > > resources of other cgroups). Every time this cgroup reclaims memory,
> > > it would disable the global shrinker (including the new proactive
> > > behavior) for other cgroup, correct? And, when they do need to swap
> > > in, it would further delay the global shrinker. Would this break of
> > > isolation be a problem?
> > >
> > > There are other concerns I raised in the cover letter's response as
> > > well - please take a look :)
> >
> > I haven't considered these cases much, but I suppose the global
> > shrinker should be delayed in both cases as well. In general, any
> > pagein/out should be prefered over shrinker writeback throughput.
> >
> > When zswap writeback was disabled for a memcg
> > (memcg.zswap.writeback=0), I suppose disabling/delaying writeback is
> > harmless.
> > If the rejection incurs no IO, there is no more memory pressure and
> > shrinking is not urgent. We can postpone the shrinker writeback. If
> > the rejection incurs IO (i.e. mm choose another page from a memcg with
> > writeback enabled), again we should delay the shrinker.
>
> You are delaying writeback globally right? IOW, other cgroup is also affected?
>
> Say we are under memory pressure, with two cgroups under reclaim - one
> with zswap writeback disabled. The one with writeback disabled will
> constantly fail at zswap_store(), and delay the global shrinking
> action, which could have targeted the other cgroup (which should
> proceed fully because there is no contention here since the first
> cgroup is not swapping either).
>

Thanks, I think I understand your concern. Even if zswap rejected
pages, that does not mean we need IO because memory.zswap.writeback=0
also disables memory-to-disk writeback...
And yes, v2 interrupts the shrinker in this case, which is
unnecessary. I'll move the timer updates to page_io.c like this:

--- a/mm/page_io.c
+++ b/mm/page_io.c
@@ -205,6 +205,7 @@ int swap_writepage(struct page *page, struct
writeback_control *wbc)
                folio_mark_dirty(folio);
                return AOP_WRITEPAGE_ACTIVATE;
        }
+       zswap_shrinker_delay_extend();

        __swap_writepage(folio, wbc);
        return 0;


This extends the delay only if actual I/O is necessary.