memcg: expose root cgroup's memory.stat

One way to measure the efficiency of memory reclaim is to look at the
ratio (pgscan+pfrefill)/pgsteal.  However at the moment these stats are
not updated consistently at the system level and the ratio of these are
not very meaningful.  The pgsteal and pgscan are updated for only global
reclaim while pgrefill gets updated for global as well as cgroup
reclaim.

Please note that this difference is only for system level vmstats.  The
cgroup stats returned by memory.stat are actually consistent.  The
cgroup's pgsteal contains number of reclaimed pages for global as well
as cgroup reclaim.  So, one way to get the system level stats is to get
these stats from root's memory.stat, so, expose memory.stat for the root
cgroup.

From Johannes Weiner:
	There are subtle differences between /proc/vmstat and
	memory.stat, and cgroup-aware code that wants to watch the full
	hierarchy currently has to know about these intricacies and
	translate semantics back and forth.

	Generally having the fully recursive memory.stat at the root
	level could help a broader range of usecases.

Why not fix the stats by including both the global and cgroup reclaim
activity instead of exposing root cgroup's memory.stat? The reason is
the benefit of having metrics exposing the activity that happens purely
due to machine capacity rather than localized activity that happens due
to the limits throughout the cgroup tree.  Additionally there are
userspace tools like sysstat(sar) which reads these stats to inform
about the system level reclaim activity.  So, we should not break such
use-cases.

Suggested-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Yafang Shao <laoar.shao@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Chris Down <chris@chrisdown.name>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200508170630.94406-1-shakeelb@google.com
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
index 2243230befd256fcf5e33b74f14b32b92e1710a4..d5bbd920398e3fdf774cf2a3562286933b0411a3 100644 (file)
--- a/mm/memcontrol.c
+++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
@@ -6228,7 +6228,6 @@ static struct cftype memory_files[] = {
        },
        {
                .name = "stat",
-               .flags = CFTYPE_NOT_ON_ROOT,
                .seq_show = memory_stat_show,
        },
        {