mm: memcontrol: decouple reference counting from page accounting
authorJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Fri, 7 Aug 2020 06:20:45 +0000 (23:20 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Fri, 7 Aug 2020 18:33:24 +0000 (11:33 -0700)
commit1a3e1f40962c445b997151a542314f3c6097f8c3
tree3934e8518a92a64e4e8fcd4c4699cca9f42365c5
parent4138fdfc8b5db5a7a4b9b50c69d475fb2ac351b7
mm: memcontrol: decouple reference counting from page accounting

The reference counting of a memcg is currently coupled directly to how
many 4k pages are charged to it.  This doesn't work well with Roman's new
slab controller, which maintains pools of objects and doesn't want to keep
an extra balance sheet for the pages backing those objects.

This unusual refcounting design (reference counts usually track pointers
to an object) is only for historical reasons: memcg used to not take any
css references and simply stalled offlining until all charges had been
reparented and the page counters had dropped to zero.  When we got rid of
the reparenting requirement, the simple mechanical translation was to take
a reference for every charge.

More historical context can be found in commit e8ea14cc6ead ("mm:
memcontrol: take a css reference for each charged page"), commit
64f219938941 ("mm: memcontrol: remove obsolete kmemcg pinning tricks") and
commit b2052564e66d ("mm: memcontrol: continue cache reclaim from offlined
groups").

The new slab controller exposes the limitations in this scheme, so let's
switch it to a more idiomatic reference counting model based on actual
kernel pointers to the memcg:

- The per-cpu stock holds a reference to the memcg its caching

- User pages hold a reference for their page->mem_cgroup. Transparent
  huge pages will no longer acquire tail references in advance, we'll
  get them if needed during the split.

- Kernel pages hold a reference for their page->mem_cgroup

- Pages allocated in the root cgroup will acquire and release css
  references for simplicity. css_get() and css_put() optimize that.

- The current memcg_charge_slab() already hacked around the per-charge
  references; this change gets rid of that as well.

- tcp accounting will handle reference in mem_cgroup_sk_{alloc,free}

Roman:
1) Rebased on top of the current mm tree: added css_get() in
   mem_cgroup_charge(), dropped mem_cgroup_try_charge() part
2) I've reformatted commit references in the commit log to make
   checkpatch.pl happy.

[hughd@google.com: remove css_put_many() from __mem_cgroup_clear_mc()]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/alpine.LSU.2.11.2007302011450.2347@eggly.anvils
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200623174037.3951353-6-guro@fb.com
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm/memcontrol.c
mm/slab.h