This adds support for allowing proactive reclaim in general on a NUMA
system. A per-node interface extends support for beyond a memcg-specific
interface, respecting the current semantics of memory.reclaim: respecting
aging LRU and not supporting artificially triggering eviction on nodes
belonging to non-bottom tiers.
This patch allows userspace to do:
echo "512M swappiness=10" > /sys/devices/system/node/nodeX/reclaim
One of the premises for this is to semantically align as best as possible
with memory.reclaim. During a brief time memcg did support nodemask until
55ab834a86a9 (Revert "mm: add nodes= arg to memory.reclaim"), for which
semantics around reclaim (eviction) vs demotion were not clear, rendering
charging expectations to be broken.
With this approach:
1. Users who do not use memcg can benefit from proactive reclaim. The
memcg interface is not NUMA aware and there are usecases that are
focusing on NUMA balancing rather than workload memory footprint.
2. Proactive reclaim on top tiers will trigger demotion, for which
memory is still byte-addressable. Reclaiming on the bottom nodes will
trigger evicting to swap (the traditional sense of reclaim). This
follows the semantics of what is today part of the aging process on
tiered memory, mirroring what every other form of reclaim does
(reactive and memcg proactive reclaim). Furthermore per-node proactive
reclaim is not as susceptible to the memcg charging problem mentioned
above.
3. Unlike the nodes= arg, this interface avoids confusing semantics,
such as what exactly the user wants when mixing top-tier and low-tier
nodes in the nodemask. Further per-node interface is less exposed to
"free up memory in my container" usecases, where eviction is intended.
4. Users that *really* want to free up memory can use proactive
reclaim on nodes knowingly to be on the bottom tiers to force eviction
in a natural way - higher access latencies are still better than swap.
If compelled, while no guarantees and perhaps not worth the effort,
users could also also potentially follow a ladder-like approach to
eventually free up the memory. Alternatively, perhaps an 'evict'
option could be added to the parameters for both memory.reclaim and
per-node interfaces to force this action unconditionally.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: user_proactive_reclaim(): return -EBUSY on PGDAT_RECLAIM_LOCKED contention, per Roman]
[dave@stgolabs.net: memcg && node is also a bogus case, per Shakeel]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250717235604.2atyx2aobwowpge3@offworld
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250623185851.830632-5-dave@stgolabs.net
Signed-off-by: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>
Acked-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev>
Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
b980077899