mm/memcg: automatically penalize tasks with high swap use

Add a memory.swap.high knob, which can be used to protect the system
from SWAP exhaustion.  The mechanism used for penalizing is similar to
memory.high penalty (sleep on return to user space).

That is not to say that the knob itself is equivalent to memory.high.
The objective is more to protect the system from potentially buggy tasks
consuming a lot of swap and impacting other tasks, or even bringing the
whole system to stand still with complete SWAP exhaustion.  Hopefully
without the need to find per-task hard limits.

Slowing misbehaving tasks down gradually allows user space oom killers
or other protection mechanisms to react.  oomd and earlyoom already do
killing based on swap exhaustion, and memory.swap.high protection will
help implement such userspace oom policies more reliably.

We can use one counter for number of pages allocated under pressure to
save struct task space and avoid two separate hierarchy walks on the hot
path.  The exact overage is calculated on return to user space, anyway.

Take the new high limit into account when determining if swap is "full".
Borrowing the explanation from Johannes:

  The idea behind "swap full" is that as long as the workload has plenty
  of swap space available and it's not changing its memory contents, it
  makes sense to generously hold on to copies of data in the swap device,
  even after the swapin.  A later reclaim cycle can drop the page without
  any IO.  Trading disk space for IO.

  But the only two ways to reclaim a swap slot is when they're faulted
  in and the references go away, or by scanning the virtual address space
  like swapoff does - which is very expensive (one could argue it's too
  expensive even for swapoff, it's often more practical to just reboot).

  So at some point in the fill level, we have to start freeing up swap
  slots on fault/swapin.  Otherwise we could eventually run out of swap
  slots while they're filled with copies of data that is also in RAM.

  We don't want to OOM a workload because its available swap space is
  filled with redundant cache.

Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Chris Down <chris@chrisdown.name>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200527195846.102707-5-kuba@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
index 5f12f203822e..b8c0460730f3 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
@@ -1374,6 +1374,22 @@ PAGE_SIZE multiple when read back.
 	The total amount of swap currently being used by the cgroup
 	and its descendants.
 
+  memory.swap.high
+	A read-write single value file which exists on non-root
+	cgroups.  The default is "max".
+
+	Swap usage throttle limit.  If a cgroup's swap usage exceeds
+	this limit, all its further allocations will be throttled to
+	allow userspace to implement custom out-of-memory procedures.
+
+	This limit marks a point of no return for the cgroup. It is NOT
+	designed to manage the amount of swapping a workload does
+	during regular operation. Compare to memory.swap.max, which
+	prohibits swapping past a set amount, but lets the cgroup
+	continue unimpeded as long as other memory can be reclaimed.
+
+	Healthy workloads are not expected to reach this limit.
+
   memory.swap.max
 	A read-write single value file which exists on non-root
 	cgroups.  The default is "max".
@@ -1387,6 +1403,10 @@ PAGE_SIZE multiple when read back.
 	otherwise, a value change in this file generates a file
 	modified event.
 
+	  high
+		The number of times the cgroup's swap usage was over
+		the high threshold.
+
 	  max
 		The number of times the cgroup's swap usage was about
 		to go over the max boundary and swap allocation