From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751386AbdBXMTz (ORCPT ); Fri, 24 Feb 2017 07:19:55 -0500 Received: from seldsegrel01.sonyericsson.com ([37.139.156.29]:9197 "EHLO SELDSEGREL01.sonyericsson.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751082AbdBXMTt (ORCPT ); Fri, 24 Feb 2017 07:19:49 -0500 Subject: Re: [PATCH] staging, android: remove lowmemory killer from the tree To: Martijn Coenen , John Stultz References: <20170222120121.12601-1-mhocko@kernel.org> CC: Michal Hocko , Greg KH , =?UTF-8?Q?Arve_Hj=c3=b8nnev=c3=a5g?= , Riley Andrews , , LKML , Linux-MM , Michal Hocko , Todd Kjos , Android Kernel Team , Rom Lemarchand , Tim Murray From: peter enderborg Message-ID: <855e929a-a891-a435-8f75-3674d8a3e96d@sonymobile.com> Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2017 13:19:46 +0100 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.7.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 02/23/2017 09:36 PM, Martijn Coenen wrote: > On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 9:24 PM, John Stultz wrote: >> So, just for context, Android does have a userland LMK daemon (using >> the mempressure notifiers) as you mentioned, but unfortunately I'm >> unaware of any devices that ship with that implementation. > I've previously worked on enabling userspace lmkd for a previous > release, but ran into some issues there (see below). > >> This is reportedly because while the mempressure notifiers provide a >> the signal to userspace, the work the deamon then has to do to look up >> per process memory usage, in order to figure out who is best to kill >> at that point was too costly and resulted in poor device performance. > In particular, mempressure requires memory cgroups to function, and we > saw performance regressions due to the accounting done in mem cgroups. > At the time we didn't have enough time left to solve this before the > release, and we reverted back to kernel lmkd. > >> So for shipping Android devices, the LMK is still needed. However, its >> not critical for basic android development, as the system will >> function without it. > It will function, but it most likely will perform horribly (as the > page cache will be trashed to such a level that the system will be > unusable). > >> Additionally I believe most vendors heavily >> customize the LMK in their vendor tree, so the value of having it in >> staging might be relatively low. >> >> It would be great however to get a discussion going here on what the >> ulmkd needs from the kernel in order to efficiently determine who best >> to kill, and how we might best implement that. > The two main issues I think we need to address are: > 1) Getting the right granularity of events from the kernel; I once > tried to submit a patch upstream to address this: > https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/2/24/582 > 2) Find out where exactly the memory cgroup overhead is coming from, > and how to reduce it or work around it to acceptable levels for > Android. This was also on 3.10, and maybe this has long been fixed or > improved in more recent kernel versions. > > I don't have cycles to work on this now, but I'm happy to talk to > whoever picks this up on the Android side. I sent some patches that is different approach. It still uses shrinkers but it has a kernel part that do the kill part better than the old one but it does it the android way. The future for this is get it triggered with other path's than slab shrinker. But we will not continue unless we get google-android to be part of it. Hocko objected heavy on the patches but seems not to see that we need something to do the job before we can disconnect from shrinker. > Thanks, > Martijn > >> thanks >> -john