Patch series "mm: vmscan: fix kswapd writeback regression".

We noticed a regression on multiple hadoop workloads when moving from
3.10 to 4.0 and 4.6, which involves kswapd getting tangled up in page
writeout, causing direct reclaim herds that also don't make progress.

I tracked it down to the thrash avoidance efforts after 3.10 that make
the kernel better at keeping use-once cache and use-many cache sorted on
the inactive and active list, with more aggressive protection of the
active list as long as there is inactive cache.  Unfortunately, our
workload's use-once cache is mostly from streaming writes.  Waiting for
writes to avoid potential reloads in the future is not a good tradeoff.

These patches do the following:

1. Wake the flushers when kswapd sees a lump of dirty pages. It's
   possible to be below the dirty background limit and still have cache
   velocity push them through the LRU. So start a-flushin'.

2. Let kswapd only write pages that have been rotated twice. This makes
   sure we really tried to get all the clean pages on the inactive list
   before resorting to horrible LRU-order writeback.

3. Move rotating dirty pages off the inactive list. Instead of churning
   or waiting on page writeback, we'll go after clean active cache. This
   might lead to thrashing, but in this state memory demand outstrips IO
   speed anyway, and reads are faster than writes.

Mel backported the series to 4.10-rc5 with one minor conflict and ran a
couple of tests on it.  Mix of read/write random workload didn't show
anything interesting.  Write-only database didn't show much difference
in performance but there were slight reductions in IO -- probably in the
noise.

simoop did show big differences although not as big as Mel expected.
This is Chris Mason's workload that similate the VM activity of hadoop.
Mel won't go through the full details but over the samples measured
during an hour it reported

                                         4.10.0-rc5            4.10.0-rc5
                                            vanilla         johannes-v1r1
Amean    p50-Read             21346531.56 (  0.00%) 21697513.24 ( -1.64%)
Amean    p95-Read             24700518.40 (  0.00%) 25743268.98 ( -4.22%)
Amean    p99-Read             27959842.13 (  0.00%) 28963271.11 ( -3.59%)
Amean    p50-Write                1138.04 (  0.00%)      989.82 ( 13.02%)
Amean    p95-Write             1106643.48 (  0.00%)    12104.00 ( 98.91%)
Amean    p99-Write             1569213.22 (  0.00%)    36343.38 ( 97.68%)
Amean    p50-Allocation          85159.82 (  0.00%)    79120.70 (  7.09%)
Amean    p95-Allocation         204222.58 (  0.00%)   129018.43 ( 36.82%)
Amean    p99-Allocation         278070.04 (  0.00%)   183354.43 ( 34.06%)
Amean    final-p50-Read       21266432.00 (  0.00%) 21921792.00 ( -3.08%)
Amean    final-p95-Read       24870912.00 (  0.00%) 26116096.00 ( -5.01%)
Amean    final-p99-Read       28147712.00 (  0.00%) 29523968.00 ( -4.89%)
Amean    final-p50-Write          1130.00 (  0.00%)      977.00 ( 13.54%)
Amean    final-p95-Write       1033216.00 (  0.00%)     2980.00 ( 99.71%)
Amean    final-p99-Write       1517568.00 (  0.00%)    32672.00 ( 97.85%)
Amean    final-p50-Allocation    86656.00 (  0.00%)    78464.00 (  9.45%)
Amean    final-p95-Allocation   211712.00 (  0.00%)   116608.00 ( 44.92%)
Amean    final-p99-Allocation   287232.00 (  0.00%)   168704.00 ( 41.27%)

The latencies are actually completely horrific in comparison to 4.4 (and
4.10-rc5 is worse than 4.9 according to historical data for reasons Mel
hasn't analysed yet).

Still, 95% of write latency (p95-write) is halved by the series and
allocation latency is way down.  Direct reclaim activity is one fifth of
what it was according to vmstats.  Kswapd activity is higher but this is
not necessarily surprising.  Kswapd efficiency is unchanged at 99% (99%
of pages scanned were reclaimed) but direct reclaim efficiency went from
77% to 99%

In the vanilla kernel, 627MB of data was written back from reclaim
context.  With the series, no data was written back.  With or without
the patch, pages are being immediately reclaimed after writeback
completes.  However, with the patch, only 1/8th of the pages are
reclaimed like this.

This patch (of 5):

We have an elaborate dirty/writeback throttling mechanism inside the
reclaim scanner, but for that to work the pages have to go through
shrink_page_list() and get counted for what they are.  Otherwise, we
mess up the LRU order and don't match reclaim speed to writeback.

Especially during deactivation, there is never a reason to skip dirty
pages; nothing is even trying to write them out from there.  Don't mess
up the LRU order for nothing, shuffle these pages along.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170123181641.23938-2-hannes@cmpxchg.org


Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Hillf Danton <hillf.zj@alibaba-inc.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>