mm: scale kswapd watermarks in proportion to memory

In machines with 140G of memory and enterprise flash storage, we have
seen read and write bursts routinely exceed the kswapd watermarks and
cause thundering herds in direct reclaim.  Unfortunately, the only way
to tune kswapd aggressiveness is through adjusting min_free_kbytes - the
system's emergency reserves - which is entirely unrelated to the
system's latency requirements.  In order to get kswapd to maintain a
250M buffer of free memory, the emergency reserves need to be set to 1G.
That is a lot of memory wasted for no good reason.

On the other hand, it's reasonable to assume that allocation bursts and
overall allocation concurrency scale with memory capacity, so it makes
sense to make kswapd aggressiveness a function of that as well.

Change the kswapd watermark scale factor from the currently fixed 25% of
the tunable emergency reserve to a tunable 0.1% of memory.

Beyond 1G of memory, this will produce bigger watermark steps than the
current formula in default settings.  Ensure that the new formula never
chooses steps smaller than that, i.e.  25% of the emergency reserve.

On a 140G machine, this raises the default watermark steps - the
distance between min and low, and low and high - from 16M to 143M.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mm.h b/include/linux/mm.h
index 75d1907b9009..f7fd64227d3a 100644
--- a/include/linux/mm.h
+++ b/include/linux/mm.h
@@ -1889,6 +1889,7 @@ extern void zone_pcp_reset(struct zone *zone);
 
 /* page_alloc.c */
 extern int min_free_kbytes;
+extern int watermark_scale_factor;
 
 /* nommu.c */
 extern atomic_long_t mmap_pages_allocated;