vmscan: memcg: always use swappiness of the reclaimed memcg

Memory reclaim always uses swappiness of the reclaim target memcg
(origin of the memory pressure) or vm_swappiness for global memory
reclaim.  This behavior was consistent (except for difference between
global and hard limit reclaim) because swappiness was enforced to be
consistent within each memcg hierarchy.

After "mm: memcontrol: remove hierarchy restrictions for swappiness and
oom_control" each memcg can have its own swappiness independent of
hierarchical parents, though, so the consistency guarantee is gone.
This can lead to an unexpected behavior.  Say that a group is explicitly
configured to not swapout by memory.swappiness=0 but its memory gets
swapped out anyway when the memory pressure comes from its parent with a
It is also unexpected that the knob is meaningless without setting the
hard limit which would trigger the reclaim and enforce the swappiness.
There are setups where the hard limit is configured higher in the
hierarchy by an administrator and children groups are under control of
somebody else who is interested in the swapout behavior but not
necessarily about the memory limit.

From a semantic point of view swappiness is an attribute defining anon
vs.
 file proportional scanning of LRU which is memcg specific (unlike
charges which are propagated up the hierarchy) so it should be applied
to the particular memcg's LRU regardless where the memory pressure comes
from.

This patch removes vmscan_swappiness() and stores the swappiness into
the scan_control structure.  mem_cgroup_swappiness is then used to
provide the correct value before shrink_lruvec is called.  The global
vm_swappiness is used for the root memcg.

[hughd@google.com: oopses immediately when booted with cgroup_disable=memory]
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 8 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt b/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
index 4937e6f..b3429ae 100644
--- a/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
+++ b/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
@@ -540,14 +540,13 @@ Note:
 
 5.3 swappiness
 
-Similar to /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, but only affecting reclaim that is
-triggered by this cgroup's hard limit.  The tunable in the root cgroup
-corresponds to the global swappiness setting.
-
-Please note that unlike the global swappiness, memcg knob set to 0
-really prevents from any swapping even if there is a swap storage
-available. This might lead to memcg OOM killer if there are no file
-pages to reclaim.
+Overrides /proc/sys/vm/swappiness for the particular group. The tunable
+in the root cgroup corresponds to the global swappiness setting.
+
+Please note that unlike during the global reclaim, limit reclaim
+enforces that 0 swappiness really prevents from any swapping even if
+there is a swap storage available. This might lead to memcg OOM killer
+if there are no file pages to reclaim.
 
 5.4 failcnt