[Devel] Re: Linux-VServer example results for sharing vs. separate mappings ...

[Kirill Korotaev]

Andrew Morton wrote:

[...skip....]
> The problem is memory reclaim.  A number of schemes which have been
> proposed require a per-container page reclaim mechanism - basically a
> separate scanner.
> 
> This is a huge, huge, huge problem.  The present scanner has been under
> development for over a decade and has had tremendous amounts of work and
> testing put into it.  And it still has problems.  But those problems will
> be gradually addressed.
>
> A per-container recaim scheme really really really wants to reuse all that
> stuff rather than creating a separate, parallel, new scanner which has the
> same robustness requirements, only has a decade less test and development
> done on it.  And which permanently doubles our maintenance costs.

So if we merge the global/container scanner code,
"virtualizing" it and using abstract lists, it will be ok for you?

> So how do we reuse our existing scanner?  With physical containers.  One
> can envisage several schemes:
> 
> a) slice the machine into 128 fake NUMA nodes, use each node as the
>    basic block of memory allocation, manage the binding between these
>    memory hunks and process groups with cpusets.
> 
>    This is what google are testing, and it works.
> 
> b) Create a new memory abstraction, call it the "software zone", which
>    is mostly decoupled from the present "hardware zones".  Most of the MM
>    is reworked to use "software zones".  The "software zones" are
>    runtime-resizeable, and obtain their pages via some means from the
>    hardware zones.  A container uses a software zone.
> 
> c) Something else, similar to the above.  Various schemes can be
>    envisaged, it isn't terribly important for this discussion.
> 
> 
> Let me repeat: this all has a huge upside in that it reuses the existing
> page reclaimation logic.  And cpusets.  Yes, we do discover glitches, but
> those glitches (such as Christoph's recent discovery of suboptimal
> interaction between cpusets and the global dirty ratio) get addressed, and
> we tend to strengthen the overall MM system as we address them.
> 
> 
> So what are the downsides?  I think mainly the sharing issue:

Honestly, I think there is another huge problem:
*Effeciency*. Look, when you have a single hardware zone,
kernel is able to do LRU shrinking efficiently when there is a global
memory shortage. People tend to overcommit memory,
so efficient behaviour in situations when none of the containers
are over their limit, but we run out of memory - is important for us.

I imagine how good it will work when we have 200 containers on the node
and each should be scanned and shrinked one by one.
Imho with zones approach it is a fundamental limitation
which can not be overcome in efficient and
fair (regarding to containers) manner.

>>>The issue with pagecache (afaik) is that if we use 
>>>containers based on physical pages (an approach which 
>>>is much preferred by myself) then we can get in a 
>>>situation where a pagecache page is physically in 
>>>container A, is not actually used by any process in 
>>>container A, but is being releatedly referenced by 
>>>processes which are in other containers and hence 
>>>unjustly consumes resources in container A.  
>>
>>>How significant a problem this is likely to be I do 
>>>not know. 
>>
>>well, with a little imagination, you can extrapolate
>>that from the data you removed from this email, as one
>>example case would be to start two unified guests one
>>after the other, then shutdown almost everything in
>>the first one, you will end up with the first one being
>>accounted all the 'shared' data used by the second one
>>while the second one will have roughly the resources
>>accounted the first one actually uses ...
> 
> 
> Right - that sort of thing.
> 
> But how much of a problem will it be *in practice*?  Probably a lot of
> people just won't notice or care.  There will be a few situations where it
> may be a problem, but perhaps we can address those?  Forced migration of
> pages from one zone into another is possible.  Or change the reclaim code
> so that a page which hasn't been referenced from a process within its
> hardware container is considered unreferenced (so it gets reclaimed).  Or a
> manual nuke-all-the-pages knob which system administration tools can use. 
> All doable, if we indeed have a demonstrable problem which needs to be
> addressed.
> 
> And I do think it's worth trying to address these things, because the
> thought of implementing a brand new memory reclaim mechanism scares the
> pants off me.

I think code is mergeable. It requires some efforts, but imho
it is better way to go. What do you think?

Thanks,
Kirill