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Johannes Weiner authored
Charge moving mode in cgroup1 allows memory to follow tasks as they migrate between cgroups. This is, and always has been, a questionable thing to do - for several reasons. First, it's expensive. Pages need to be identified, locked and isolated from various MM operations, and reassigned, one by one. Second, it's unreliable. Once pages are charged to a cgroup, there isn't always a clear owner task anymore. Cache isn't moved at all, for example. Mapped memory is moved - but if trylocking or isolating a page fails, it's arbitrarily left behind. Frequent moving between domains may leave a task's memory scattered all over the place. Third, it isn't really needed. Launcher tasks can kick off workload tasks directly in their target cgroup. Using dedicated per-workload groups allows fine-grained policy adjustments - no need to move tasks and their physical pages between control domains. The feature was never forward-ported to cgroup2, and it hasn't been missed. Despite it being a niche usecase, the maintenance overhead of supporting it is enormous. Because pages are moved while they are live and subject to various MM operations, the synchronization rules are complicated. There are lock_page_memcg() in MM and FS code, which non-cgroup people don't understand. In some cases we've been able to shift code and cgroup API calls around such that we can rely on native locking as much as possible. But that's fragile, and sometimes we need to hold MM locks for longer than we otherwise would (pte lock e.g.). Mark the feature deprecated. Hopefully we can remove it soon. And backport into -stable kernels so that people who develop against earlier kernels are warned about this deprecation as early as possible. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix memory.rst underlining] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/Y5COd+qXwk/S+n8N@cmpxchg.orgSigned-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Acked-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Cc: Muchun Song <songmuchun@bytedance.com> Cc: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev> Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
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