mm: thrash detection-based file cache sizing

The VM maintains cached filesystem pages on two types of lists.  One
list holds the pages recently faulted into the cache, the other list
holds pages that have been referenced repeatedly on that first list.
The idea is to prefer reclaiming young pages over those that have shown
to benefit from caching in the past.  We call the recently usedbut
ultimately was not significantly better than a FIFO policy and still
thrashed cache based on eviction speed, rather than actual demand for
cache.

This patch solves one half of the problem by decoupling the ability to
detect working set changes from the inactive list size.  By maintaining
a history of recently evicted file pages it can detect frequently used
pages with an arbitrarily small inactive list size, and subsequently
apply pressure on the active list based on actual demand for cache, not
just overall eviction speed.

Every zone maintains a counter that tracks inactive list aging speed.
When a page is evicted, a snapshot of this counter is stored in the
now-empty page cache radix tree slot.  On refault, the minimum access
distance of the page can be assessed, to evaluate whether the page
should be part of the active list or not.

This fixes the VM's blindness towards working set changes in excess of
the inactive list.  And it's the foundation to further improve the
protection ability and reduce the minimum inactive list size of 50%.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Bob Liu <bob.liu@oracle.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Metin Doslu <metin@citusdata.com>
Cc: Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com>
Cc: Ozgun Erdogan <ozgun@citusdata.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <klamm@yandex-team.ru>
Cc: Ryan Mallon <rmallon@gmail.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/vmstat.c b/mm/vmstat.c
index def5dd2..843125a 100644
--- a/mm/vmstat.c
+++ b/mm/vmstat.c
@@ -770,6 +770,8 @@ const char * const vmstat_text[] = {
 	"numa_local",
 	"numa_other",
 #endif
+	"workingset_refault",
+	"workingset_activate",
 	"nr_anon_transparent_hugepages",
 	"nr_free_cma",
 	"nr_dirty_threshold",