mm/damon/paddr: support the pageout scheme
Introduction ============ This patchset 1) makes the engine for general data access pattern-oriented memory management (DAMOS) be more useful for production environments, and 2) implements a static kernel module for lightweight proactive reclamation using the engine. Proactive Reclamation --------------------- On general memory over-committed systems, proactively reclaiming cold pages helps saving memory and reducing latency spikes that incurred by the direct reclaim or the CPU consumption of kswapd, while incurring only minimal performance degradation[2]. A Free Pages Reporting[8] based memory over-commit virtualization system would be one more specific use case. In the system, the guest VMs reports their free memory to host, and the host reallocates the reported memory to other guests. As a result, the system's memory utilization can be maximized. However, the guests could be not so memory-frugal, because some kernel subsystems and user-space applications are designed to use as much memory as available. Then, guests would report only small amount of free memory to host, results in poor memory utilization. Running the proactive reclamation in such guests could help mitigating this problem. Google has also implemented this idea and using it in their data center. They further proposed upstreaming it in LSFMM'19, and "the general consensus was that, while this sort of proactive reclaim would be useful for a number of users, the cost of this particular solution was too high to consider merging it upstream"[3]. The cost mainly comes from the coldness tracking. Roughly speaking, the implementation periodically scans the 'Accessed' bit of each page. For the reason, the overhead linearly increases as the size of the memory and the scanning frequency grows. As a result, Google is known to dedicating one CPU for the work. That's a reasonable option to someone like Google, but it wouldn't be so to some others. DAMON and DAMOS: An engine for data access pattern-oriented memory management ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- DAMON[4] is a framework for general data access monitoring. Its adaptive monitoring overhead control feature minimizes its monitoring overhead. It also let the upper-bound of the overhead be configurable by clients, regardless of the size of the monitoring target memory. While monitoring 70 GiB memory of a production system every 5 milliseconds, it consumes less than 1% single CPU time. For this, it could sacrify some of the quality of the monitoring results. Nevertheless, the lower-bound of the quality is configurable, and it uses a best-effort algorithm for better quality. Our test results[5] show the quality is practical enough. From the production system monitoring, we were able to find a 4 KiB region in the 70 GiB memory that shows highest access frequency. We normally don't monitor the data access pattern just for fun but to improve something like memory management. Proactive reclamation is one such usage. For such general cases, DAMON provides a feature called DAMon-based Operation Schemes (DAMOS)[6]. It makes DAMON an engine for general data access pattern oriented memory management. Using this, clients can ask DAMON to find memory regions of specific data access pattern and apply some memory management action (e.g., page out, move to head of the LRU list, use huge page, ...). We call the request 'scheme'. Proactive Reclamation on top of DAMON/DAMOS ------------------------------------------- Therefore, by using DAMON for the cold pages detection, the proactive reclamation's monitoring overhead issue can be solved. Actually, we previously implemented a version of proactive reclamation using DAMOS and achieved noticeable improvements with our evaluation setup[5]. Nevertheless, it more for a proof-of-concept, rather than production uses. It supports only virtual address spaces of processes, and require additional tuning efforts for given workloads and the hardware. For the tuning, we introduced a simple auto-tuning user space tool[8]. Google is also known to using a ML-based similar approach for their fleets[2]. But, making it just works with intuitive knobs in the kernel would be helpful for general users. To this end, this patchset improves DAMOS to be ready for such production usages, and implements another version of the proactive reclamation, namely DAMON_RECLAIM, on top of it. DAMOS Improvements: Aggressiveness Control, Prioritization, and Watermarks -------------------------------------------------------------------------- First of all, the current version of DAMOS supports only virtual address spaces. This patchset makes it supports the physical address space for the page out action. Next major problem of the current version of DAMOS is the lack of the aggressiveness control, which can results in arbitrary overhead. For example, if huge memory regions having the data access pattern of interest are found, applying the requested action to all of the regions could incur significant overhead. It can be controlled by tuning the target data access pattern with manual or automated approaches[2,7]. But, some people would prefer the kernel to just work with only intuitive tuning or default values. For such cases, this patchset implements a safeguard, namely time/size quota. Using this, the clients can specify up to how much time can be used for applying the action, and/or up to how much memory regions the action can be applied within a user-specified time duration. A followup question is, to which memory regions should the action applied within the limits? We implement a simple regions prioritization mechanism for each action and make DAMOS to apply the action to high priority regions first. It also allows clients tune the prioritization mechanism to use different weights for size, access frequency, and age of memory regions. This means we could use not only LRU but also LFU or some fancy algorithms like CAR[9] with lightweight overhead. Though DAMON is lightweight, someone would want to remove even the cold pages monitoring overhead when it is unnecessary. Currently, it should manually turned on and off by clients, but some clients would simply want to turn it on and off based on some metrics like free memory ratio or memory fragmentation. For such cases, this patchset implements a watermarks-based automatic activation feature. It allows the clients configure the metric of their interest, and three watermarks of the metric. If the metric is higher than the high watermark or lower than the low watermark, the scheme is deactivated. If the metric is lower than the mid watermark but higher than the low watermark, the scheme is activated. DAMON-based Reclaim ------------------- Using the improved version of DAMOS, this patchset implements a static kernel module called 'damon_reclaim'. It finds memory regions that didn't accessed for specific time duration and page out. Consuming too much CPU for the paging out operations, or doing pageout too frequently can be critical for systems configuring their swap devices with software-defined in-memory block devices like zram/zswap or total number of writes limited devices like SSDs, respectively. To avoid the problems, the time/size quotas can be configured. Under the quotas, it pages out memory regions that didn't accessed longer first. Also, to remove the monitoring overhead under peaceful situation, and to fall back to the LRU-list based page granularity reclamation when it doesn't make progress, the three watermarks based activation mechanism is used, with the free memory ratio as the watermark metric. For convenient configurations, it provides several module parameters. Using these, sysadmins can enable/disable it, and tune its parameters including the coldness identification time threshold, the time/size quotas and the three watermarks. Evaluation ========== In short, DAMON_RECLAIM with 50ms/s time quota and regions prioritization on v5.15-rc5 Linux kernel with ZRAM swap device achieves 38.58% memory saving with only 1.94% runtime overhead. For this, DAMON_RECLAIM consumes only 4.97% of single CPU time. Setup ----- We evaluate DAMON_RECLAIM to show how each of the DAMOS improvements make effect. For this, we measure DAMON_RECLAIM's CPU consumption, entire system memory footprint, total number of major page faults, and runtime of 24 realistic workloads in PARSEC3 and SPLASH-2X benchmark suites on my QEMU/KVM based virtual machine. The virtual machine runs on an i3.metal AWS instance, has 130GiB memory, and runs a linux kernel built on latest -mm tree[1] plus this patchset. It also utilizes a 4 GiB ZRAM swap device. We repeats the measurement 5 times and use averages. [1] https://github.com/hnaz/linux-mm/tree/v5.15-rc5-mmots-2021-10-13-19-55 Detailed Results ---------------- The results are summarized in the below table. With coldness identification threshold of 5 seconds, DAMON_RECLAIM without the time quota-based speed limit achieves 47.21% memory saving, but incur 4.59% runtime slowdown to the workloads on average. For this, DAMON_RECLAIM consumes about 11.28% single CPU time. Applying time quotas of 200ms/s, 50ms/s, and 10ms/s without the regions prioritization reduces the slowdown to 4.89%, 2.65%, and 1.5%, respectively. Time quota of 200ms/s (20%) makes no real change compared to the quota unapplied version, because the quota unapplied version consumes only 11.28% CPU time. DAMON_RECLAIM's CPU utilization also similarly reduced: 11.24%, 5.51%, and 2.01% of single CPU time. That is, the overhead is proportional to the speed limit. Nevertheless, it also reduces the memory saving because it becomes less aggressive. In detail, the three variants show 48.76%, 37.83%, and 7.85% memory saving, respectively. Applying the regions prioritization (page out regions that not accessed longer first within the time quota) further reduces the performance degradation. Runtime slowdowns and total number of major page faults increase has been 4.89%/218,690% -> 4.39%/166,136% (200ms/s), 2.65%/111,886% -> 1.94%/59,053% (50ms/s), and 1.5%/34,973.40% -> 2.08%/8,781.75% (10ms/s). The runtime under 10ms/s time quota has increased with prioritization, but apparently that's under the margin of error. time quota prioritization memory_saving cpu_util slowdown pgmajfaults overhead N N 47.21% 11.28% 4.59% 194,802% 200ms/s N 48.76% 11.24% 4.89% 218,690% 50ms/s N 37.83% 5.51% 2.65% 111,886% 10ms/s N 7.85% 2.01% 1.5% 34,793.40% 200ms/s Y 50.08% 10.38% 4.39% 166,136% 50ms/s Y 38.58% 4.97% 1.94% 59,053% 10ms/s Y 3.63% 1.73% 2.08% 8,781.75% Baseline and Complete Git Trees =============================== The patches are based on the latest -mm tree (v5.15-rc5-mmots-2021-10-13-19-55). You can also clone the complete git tree from: $ git clone git://github.com/sjp38/linux -b damon_reclaim/patches/v1 The web is also available: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/sj/linux.git/tag/?h=damon_reclaim/patches/v1 Sequence Of Patches =================== The first patch makes DAMOS support the physical address space for the page out action. Following five patches (patches 2-6) implement the time/size quotas. Next four patches (patches 7-10) implement the memory regions prioritization within the limit. Then, three following patches (patches 11-13) implement the watermarks-based schemes activation. Finally, the last two patches (patches 14-15) implement and document the DAMON-based reclamation using the advanced DAMOS. [1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.15-rc1/vm/damon/index.html [2] https://research.google/pubs/pub48551/ [3] https://lwn.net/Articles/787611/ [4] https://damonitor.github.io [5] https://damonitor.github.io/doc/html/latest/vm/damon/eval.html [6] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20211001125604.29660-1-sj@kernel.org/ [7] https://github.com/awslabs/damoos [8] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/vm/free_page_reporting.html [9] https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast-04/car-clock-adaptive-replacement This patch (of 15): This makes the DAMON primitives for physical address space support the pageout action for DAMON-based Operation Schemes. With this commit, hence, users can easily implement system-level data access-aware reclamations using DAMOS. [sj@kernel.org: fix missing-prototype build warning] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20211025064220.13904-1-sj@kernel.org Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20211019150731.16699-1-sj@kernel.org Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20211019150731.16699-2-sj@kernel.orgSigned-off-by:SeongJae Park <sj@kernel.org> Cc: Jonathan Cameron <Jonathan.Cameron@huawei.com> Cc: Amit Shah <amit@kernel.org> Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> Cc: David Woodhouse <dwmw@amazon.com> Cc: Marco Elver <elver@google.com> Cc: Leonard Foerster <foersleo@amazon.de> Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com> Cc: Markus Boehme <markubo@amazon.de> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> Cc: Shuah Khan <shuah@kernel.org> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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