Re: [PATCH v2] mm, shrinker: make shrinker_list lockless

[Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>]

On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 4:07 PM, Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 09:37:40AM -0800, Shakeel Butt wrote:
>> In our production, we have observed that the job loader gets stuck for
>> 10s of seconds while doing mount operation. It turns out that it was
>> stuck in register_shrinker() and some unrelated job was under memory
>> pressure and spending time in shrink_slab(). Our machines have a lot
>> of shrinkers registered and jobs under memory pressure has to traverse
>> all of those memcg-aware shrinkers and do affect unrelated jobs which
>> want to register their own shrinkers.
>>
>> This patch has made the shrinker_list traversal lockless and shrinker
>> register remain fast. For the shrinker unregister, atomic counter
>> has been introduced to avoid synchronize_rcu() call. The fields of
>
> So, do you want to enhance unregister shrinker path as well as registering?
>

Yes, I don't want to add delay to unregister_shrinker for the normal
case where there isn't any readers (i.e. unconditional
synchronize_rcu).

>> struct shrinker has been rearraged to make sure that the size does
>> not increase for x86_64.
>>
>> The shrinker functions are allowed to reschedule() and thus can not
>> be called with rcu read lock. One way to resolve that is to use
>> srcu read lock but then ifdefs has to be used as SRCU is behind
>> CONFIG_SRCU. Another way is to just release the rcu read lock before
>> calling the shrinker and reacquire on the return. The atomic counter
>> will make sure that the shrinker entry will not be freed under us.
>
> Instead of adding new lock, could we simply release shrinker_rwsem read-side
> lock in list traveral periodically to give a chance to hold a write-side
> lock?
>

Greg has already pointed out that this patch is still not right/safe
and now I am getting to the opinion that without changing the shrinker
API, it might not be possible to do lockless shrinker traversal and
unregister shrinker without synchronize_rcu().

Regarding your suggestion, do you mean to add periodic release lock
and reacquire using down_read_trylock() or down_read()?