Add a memory.swap.high knob, which can be used to protect the system
from SWAP exhaustion. The mechanism used for penalizing is similar to
memory.high penalty (sleep on return to user space).
That is not to say that the knob itself is equivalent to memory.high.
The objective is more to protect the system from potentially buggy tasks
consuming a lot of swap and impacting other tasks, or even bringing the
whole system to stand still with complete SWAP exhaustion. Hopefully
without the need to find per-task hard limits.
Slowing misbehaving tasks down gradually allows user space oom killers
or other protection mechanisms to react. oomd and earlyoom already do
killing based on swap exhaustion, and memory.swap.high protection will
help implement such userspace oom policies more reliably.
We can use one counter for number of pages allocated under pressure to
save struct task space and avoid two separate hierarchy walks on the hot
path. The exact overage is calculated on return to user space, anyway.
Take the new high limit into account when determining if swap is "full".
Borrowing the explanation from Johannes:
The idea behind "swap full" is that as long as the workload has plenty
of swap space available and it's not changing its memory contents, it
makes sense to generously hold on to copies of data in the swap device,
even after the swapin. A later reclaim cycle can drop the page without
any IO. Trading disk space for IO.
But the only two ways to reclaim a swap slot is when they're faulted
in and the references go away, or by scanning the virtual address space
like swapoff does - which is very expensive (one could argue it's too
expensive even for swapoff, it's often more practical to just reboot).
So at some point in the fill level, we have to start freeing up swap
slots on fault/swapin. Otherwise we could eventually run out of swap
slots while they're filled with copies of data that is also in RAM.
We don't want to OOM a workload because its available swap space is
filled with redundant cache.
Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Chris Down <chris@chrisdown.name>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200527195846.102707-5-kuba@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
4b82ab4f28
