From: Hui Zhu <[email protected]> BPF programs can observe memory pressure on a cgroup (e.g. refault stats via bpf_mem_cgroup_page_state()), but cannot act on it: triggering reclaim on a chosen cgroup requires writing to memory.reclaim, which BPF cannot do. This series adds bpf_proactive_reclaim(), a sleepable kfunc performing one proactive reclaim pass on a target memcg, so when and how hard to reclaim is BPF policy rather than hard-coded thresholds.
The kfunc is restricted to BPF_PROG_TYPE_SYSCALL so that reclaim always runs in a clean process context: generic sleepable programs may execute with filesystem locks held or in NOFS/NOIO contexts, where the reclaim path could deadlock in filesystem shrinkers. The bpf_wq and task_work callbacks of a SYSCALL program keep its program type and run in process context, so reclaim work can still be queued asynchronously through them, as the selftest does with bpf_wq. The use case we are looking at is protecting high-priority workloads: a BPF program monitors the state of a high-priority cgroup and, when it degrades (e.g. PSI rises or refaults increase, as in the selftest), asynchronously reclaims memory from low-priority cgroups via bpf_wq and bpf_proactive_reclaim(), giving the pressured cgroup more free pages. Another use case: several vendor-maintained kernels carry private implementations that trigger asynchronous reclaim when a memcg enters a certain state. These exist for historical and partly psychological reasons, but the underlying demand is real. We expect BPF-driven proactive reclaim, combined with the BPF hooks for the memory controller currently under discussion and development, to serve these needs in mainline, reducing kernel fragmentation and improving kernel maintainability. Hui Zhu (2): mm/bpf: Add bpf_proactive_reclaim kfunc selftests/bpf: Add memcg async reclaim test mm/bpf_memcontrol.c | 76 ++- .../bpf/prog_tests/memcg_async_reclaim.c | 480 ++++++++++++++++++ .../selftests/bpf/progs/memcg_async_reclaim.c | 181 +++++++ 3 files changed, 735 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/bpf/prog_tests/memcg_async_reclaim.c create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/bpf/progs/memcg_async_reclaim.c -- 2.53.0
