Re: [PATCH v8 03/17] mm: Assign id to every memcg-aware shrinker

From: Kirill Tkhai
Date: Tue Jul 03 2018 - 15:13:11 EST


On 03.07.2018 20:58, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 06:46:57PM +0300, Kirill Tkhai wrote:
>> shrinker_idr now contains only memcg-aware shrinkers, so all bits from memcg map
>> may be potentially populated. In case of memcg-aware shrinkers and !memcg-aware
>> shrinkers share the same numbers like you suggest, this will lead to increasing
>> size of memcg maps, which is bad for memory consumption. So, memcg-aware shrinkers
>> should to have its own IDR and its own numbers. The tricks like allocation big
>> IDs for !memcg-aware shrinkers seem bad for me, since they make the code more
>> complicated.
>
> Do we really have so very many !memcg-aware shrinkers?
>
> $ git grep -w register_shrinker |wc
> 32 119 2221
> $ git grep -w register_shrinker_prepared |wc
> 4 13 268
> (that's an overstatement; one of those is the declaration, one the definition,
> and one an internal call, so we actually only have one caller of _prepared).
>
> So it looks to me like your average system has one shrinker per
> filesystem, one per graphics card, one per raid5 device, and a few
> miscellaneous. I'd be shocked if anybody had more than 100 shrinkers
> registered on their laptop.
>
> I think we should err on the side of simiplicity and just have one IDR for
> every shrinker instead of playing games to solve a theoretical problem.

It just a standard situation for the systems with many containers. Every mount
introduce a new shrinker to the system, so it's easy to see a system with
100 or ever 1000 shrinkers. AFAIR, Shakeel said he also has the similar
configurations.

So, this problem is not theoretical, it's just a standard situation
for active consumer or Docker/etc.

>>> This will actually reduce the size of each shrinker and be more
>>> cache-efficient when calling the shrinkers. I think we can also get
>>> rid of the shrinker_rwsem eventually, but let's leave it for now.
>>
>> This patchset does not make the cache-efficient bad, since without the patchset the situation
>> is so bad, that it's just impossible to talk about the cache efficiently,
>> so let's leave lockless iteration/etc for the future works.
>
> The situation is that bad /for your use case/. Not so much for others.
> You're introducing additional complexity here, and it'd be nice if we
> can remove some of the complexity that's already there.

You started from cache-efficienty, and now you moved to existing complexity.
I did some cleanups in this patchset, also there is Vladimir's patch, which
simplifies shrinker logic. Also there is already 17 patches.
Which already existing complexity you want to remove? I don't think there is
existing complexity directly connected to this patchset.