The buffer_head can consume a significant amount of system memory and is
directly related to the amount of page cache. In our production
environment we have observed that a lot of machines are spending a
significant amount of memory as buffer_head and can not be left as
system memory overhead.
Charging buffer_head is not as simple as adding __GFP_ACCOUNT to the
allocation. The buffer_heads can be allocated in a memcg different from
the memcg of the page for which buffer_heads are being allocated. One
concrete example is memory reclaim. The reclaim can trigger I/O of
pages of any memcg on the system. So, the right way to charge
buffer_head is to extract the memcg from the page for which buffer_heads
are being allocated and then use targeted memcg charging API.
[shakeelb@google.com: use __GFP_ACCOUNT for directed memcg charging]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180702220208.213380-1-shakeelb@google.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180627191250.209150-3-shakeelb@google.com
Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
f745c6f5fe