mm: deactivations shouldn't bias the LRU balance

Operations like MADV_FREE, FADV_DONTNEED etc.  currently move any affected
active pages to the inactive list to accelerate their reclaim (good) but
also steer page reclaim toward that LRU type, or away from the other
(bad).

The reason why this is undesirable is that such operations are not part of
the regular page aging cycle, and rather a fluke that doesn't say much
about the remaining pages on that list; they might all be in heavy use,
and once the chunk of easy victims has been purged, the VM continues to
apply elevated pressure on those remaining hot pages.  The other LRU,
meanwhile, might have easily reclaimable pages, and there was never a need
to steer away from it in the first place.

As the previous patch outlined, we should focus on recording actually
observed cost to steer the balance rather than speculating about the
potential value of one LRU list over the other.  In that spirit, leave
explicitely deactivated pages to the LRU algorithm to pick up, and let
rotations decide which list is the easiest to reclaim.

[[email protected]: fix set-but-not-used warning]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <[email protected]>
Cc: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Cc: Qian Cai <[email protected]>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 6 deletions

diff --git a/mm/swap.c b/mm/swap.c
index fedeb925dbfe..7d552af25797 100644
--- a/mm/swap.c
+++ b/mm/swap.c
@@ -498,7 +498,7 @@ void lru_cache_add_active_or_unevictable(struct page *page,
 static void lru_deactivate_file_fn(struct page *page, struct lruvec *lruvec,
 			      void *arg)
 {
-	int lru, file;
+	int lru;
 	bool active;
 
 	if (!PageLRU(page))
@@ -512,7 +512,6 @@ static void lru_deactivate_file_fn(struct page *page, struct lruvec *lruvec,
 		return;
 
 	active = PageActive(page);
-	file = page_is_file_lru(page);
 	lru = page_lru_base_type(page);
 
 	del_page_from_lru_list(page, lruvec, lru + active);
@@ -538,14 +537,12 @@ static void lru_deactivate_file_fn(struct page *page, struct lruvec *lruvec,
 
 	if (active)
 		__count_vm_event(PGDEACTIVATE);
-	lru_note_cost(lruvec, !file, hpage_nr_pages(page));
 }
 
 static void lru_deactivate_fn(struct page *page, struct lruvec *lruvec,
 			    void *arg)
 {
 	if (PageLRU(page) && PageActive(page) && !PageUnevictable(page)) {
-		int file = page_is_file_lru(page);
 		int lru = page_lru_base_type(page);
 
 		del_page_from_lru_list(page, lruvec, lru + LRU_ACTIVE);
@@ -554,7 +551,6 @@ static void lru_deactivate_fn(struct page *page, struct lruvec *lruvec,
 		add_page_to_lru_list(page, lruvec, lru);
 
 		__count_vm_events(PGDEACTIVATE, hpage_nr_pages(page));
-		lru_note_cost(lruvec, !file, hpage_nr_pages(page));
 	}
 }
 
@@ -579,7 +575,6 @@ static void lru_lazyfree_fn(struct page *page, struct lruvec *lruvec,
 
 		__count_vm_events(PGLAZYFREE, hpage_nr_pages(page));
 		count_memcg_page_event(page, PGLAZYFREE);
-		lru_note_cost(lruvec, 0, hpage_nr_pages(page));
 	}
 }