Re: [PATCH RFC 2/5] mm: memcg/percpu: account percpu memory to memory cgroups

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 01:18:03PM -0700, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> Percpu memory is becoming more and more widely used by various
> subsystems, and the total amount of memory controlled by the percpu
> allocator can make a good part of the total memory.
> 
> As an example, bpf maps can consume a lot of percpu memory,
> and they are created by a user. Also, some cgroup internals
> (e.g. memory controller statistics) can be quite large.
> On a machine with many CPUs and big number of cgroups they
> can consume hundreds of megabytes.
> 
> So the lack of memcg accounting is creating a breach in the memory
> isolation. Similar to the slab memory, percpu memory should be
> accounted by default.
> 
> To implement the perpcu accounting it's possible to take the slab
> memory accounting as a model to follow. Let's introduce two types of
> percpu chunks: root and memcg. What makes memcg chunks different is
> an additional space allocated to store memcg membership information.
> If __GFP_ACCOUNT is passed on allocation, a memcg chunk should be be
> used. If it's possible to charge the corresponding size to the target
> memory cgroup, allocation is performed, and the memcg ownership data
> is recorded. System-wide allocations are performed using root chunks,
> so there is no additional memory overhead.
> 
> To implement a fast reparenting of percpu memory on memcg removal,
> we don't store mem_cgroup pointers directly: instead we use obj_cgroup
> API, introduced for slab accounting.

The overall approach makes sense to me but it'd help to have a high level
comment explaining what's going on and why.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun