MADV_FREE is a hint that it's okay to discard pages if there is memory
pressure and we use reclaimers(ie, kswapd and direct reclaim) to free them
so there is no value keeping them in the active anonymous LRU so this
patch moves them to inactive LRU list's head.
This means that MADV_FREE-ed pages which were living on the inactive list
are reclaimed first because they are more likely to be cold rather than
recently active pages.
An arguable issue for the approach would be whether we should put the page
to the head or tail of the inactive list. I chose head because the kernel
cannot make sure it's really cold or warm for every MADV_FREE usecase but
at least we know it's not *hot*, so landing of inactive head would be a
comprimise for various usecases.
This fixes suboptimal behavior of MADV_FREE when pages living on the
active list will sit there for a long time even under memory pressure
while the inactive list is reclaimed heavily. This basically breaks the
whole purpose of using MADV_FREE to help the system to free memory which
is might not be used.
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org> Cc: Wang, Yalin <Yalin.Wang@sonymobile.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>