mm: add swappiness=max arg to memory.reclaim for only anon reclaim

Patch series "add max arg to swappiness in memory.reclaim and lru_gen", v4.

This patchset adds max arg to swappiness in memory.reclaim and lru_gen for
anon only proactive memory reclaim.

With commit <68cd9050d871> ("mm: add swappiness= arg to memory.reclaim")
we can submit an additional swappiness=<val> argument to memory.reclaim. 
It is very useful because we can dynamically adjust the reclamation ratio
based on the anonymous folios and file folios of each cgroup.  For
example,when swappiness is set to 0, we only reclaim from file folios. 
But we can not relciam memory just from anon folios.

This patchset introduces a new macro, SWAPPINESS_ANON_ONLY, defined as
MAX_SWAPPINESS + 1, represent the max arg semantics.  It specifically
indicates that reclamation should occur only from anonymous pages.

Patch 1 adds swappiness=max arg to memory.reclaim suggested-by: Yosry
Ahmed

Patch 2 add more comments for cache_trim_mode from Johannes Weiner in [1].

Patch 3 add max arg to lru_gen for proactive memory reclaim in MGLRU.  The
MGLRU already supports reclaiming exclusively from anonymous pages.  This
patch formalizes that behavior by introducing a max parameter to represent
the corresponding semantics.

Patch 4 using SWAPPINESS_ANON_ONLY in MGLRU Using SWAPPINESS_ANON_ONLY
instead of MAX_SWAPPINESS + 1 to indicate reclaiming only from anonymous
pages makes the code more readable and explicit

Here is the previous discussion:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250314033350.1156370-1-hezhongkun.hzk@bytedance.com/
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250312094337.2296278-1-hezhongkun.hzk@bytedance.com/
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250318135330.3358345-1-hezhongkun.hzk@bytedance.com/


This patch (of 4):

With commit <68cd9050d871> ("mm: add swappiness= arg to memory.reclaim")
we can submit an additional swappiness=<val> argument to memory.reclaim. 
It is very useful because we can dynamically adjust the reclamation ratio
based on the anonymous folios and file folios of each cgroup.  For
example,when swappiness is set to 0, we only reclaim from file folios.

However,we have also encountered a new issue: when swappiness is set to
the MAX_SWAPPINESS, it may still only reclaim file folios.

So, we hope to add a new arg 'swappiness=max' in memory.reclaim where
proactive memory reclaim only reclaims from anonymous folios when
swappiness is set to max.  The swappiness semantics from a user
perspective remain unchanged.

For example, something like this:

echo "2M swappiness=max" > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory.reclaim

will perform reclaim on the rootcg with a swappiness setting of 'max' (a
new mode) regardless of the file folios.  Users have a more comprehensive
view of the application's memory distribution because there are many
metrics available.  For example, if we find that a certain cgroup has a
large number of inactive anon folios, we can reclaim only those and skip
file folios, because with the zram/zswap, the IO tradeoff that
cache_trim_mode or other file first logic is making doesn't hold - file
refaults will cause IO, whereas anon decompression will not.

With this patch, the swappiness argument of memory.reclaim has a new
mode 'max', means reclaiming just from anonymous folios both in traditional
LRU and MGLRU.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/cover.1745225696.git.hezhongkun.hzk@bytedance.com
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250314141833.GA1316033@cmpxchg.org/ [1]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/519e12b9b1f8c31a01e228c8b4b91a2419684f77.1745225696.git.hezhongkun.hzk@bytedance.com
Signed-off-by: Zhongkun He <hezhongkun.hzk@bytedance.com>
Suggested-by: Yosry Ahmed <yosry.ahmed@linux.dev>
Acked-by: Muchun Song <muchun.song@linux.dev>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
index d537f3d3fed9..acf855851c03 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
@@ -1372,6 +1372,9 @@ The following nested keys are defined.
 	same semantics as vm.swappiness applied to memcg reclaim with
 	all the existing limitations and potential future extensions.
 
+	The valid range for swappiness is [0-200, max], setting
+	swappiness=max exclusively reclaims anonymous memory.
+
   memory.peak
 	A read-write single value file which exists on non-root cgroups.