mm: memcontrol: deprecate charge moving

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.org
Signed-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>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
index a698a2b6523b..49f67176a1a2 100644
--- a/mm/memcontrol.c
+++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
@@ -3919,6 +3919,10 @@ static int mem_cgroup_move_charge_write(struct cgroup_subsys_state *css,
 {
 	struct mem_cgroup *memcg = mem_cgroup_from_css(css);
 
+	pr_warn_once("Cgroup memory moving (move_charge_at_immigrate) is deprecated. "
+		     "Please report your usecase to linux-mm@kvack.org if you "
+		     "depend on this functionality.\n");
+
 	if (val & ~MOVE_MASK)
 		return -EINVAL;