Re: [PATCH 1/3] mm: return the number of pages successfully paged out

[Minchan Kim]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:10:44AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Tue 17-01-23 15:16:30, Minchan Kim wrote:
> > The reclaim_pages MADV_PAGEOUT uses needs to return the number of
> > pages paged-out successfully, not only the number of reclaimed pages
> > in the operation because those pages paged-out successfully will be
> > reclaimed easily at the memory pressure due to asynchronous writeback
> > rotation(i.e., PG_reclaim with folio_rotate_reclaimable).
> > 
> > This patch renames the reclaim_pages with paging_out(with hope that
> > it's clear from operation point of view) and then adds a additional
> > stat in reclaim_stat to represent the number of paged-out but kept
> > in the memory for rotation on writeback completion.
> > 
> > With that stat, madvise_pageout can know how many pages were paged-out
> > successfully as well as reclaimed. The return value will be used for
> > statistics in next patch.
> 
> I really fail to see the reson for the rename and paging_out doesn't
> even make much sense as a name TBH.

Currently, what we are doing to reclaim memory is

reclaim_folio_list
    shrink_folio_list
        if (folio_mapped(folio))
            try_to_unmap(folio)

        if (folio_test_dirty(folio))
            pageout

Based on the structure, pageout is just one of way to reclaim memory.

With MADV_PAGEOUT, what user want to know how many pages
were paged out as they requested(from userspace PoV, how many times
pages fault happens in future accesses), not the number of reclaimed
pages shrink_folio_list returns currently.

In the sense, I wanted to distinguish between reclaim and pageout.