The global kswapd scans per-zone LRU and reclaims pages regardless of the
cgroup. It breaks memory isolation since one cgroup can end up reclaiming
pages from another cgroup. Instead we should rely on memcg-aware target
reclaim including per-memcg kswapd and soft_limit hierarchical reclaim under
memory pressure.

In the global background reclaim, we do soft reclaim before scanning the
per-zone LRU. However, the return value is ignored. This patch is the first
step to skip shrink_zone() if soft_limit reclaim does enough work.

This is part of the effort which tries to reduce reclaiming pages in global
LRU in memcg. The per-memcg background reclaim patchset further enhances the
per-cgroup targetting reclaim, which I should have V4 posted shortly.

Try running multiple memory intensive workloads within seperate memcgs. Watch
the counters of soft_steal in memory.stat.

  $ cat /dev/cgroup/A/memory.stat | grep 'soft'
  soft_steal 240000
  soft_scan 240000
  total_soft_steal 240000
  total_soft_scan 240000

This patch:

In the global background reclaim, we do soft reclaim before scanning the
per-zone LRU.  However, the return value is ignored.

We would like to skip shrink_zone() if soft_limit reclaim does enough
work.  Also, we need to make the memory pressure balanced across per-memcg
zones, like the logic vm-core.  This patch is the first step where we
start with counting the nr_scanned and nr_reclaimed from soft_limit
reclaim into the global scan_control.
Signed-off-by: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>