Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm, memcg: Avoid stale protection values when cgroup is above protection

[Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>]

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 04:57:21PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Wed 29-04-20 12:56:27, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> [...]
> > I think to address this, we need a more comprehensive solution and
> > introduce some form of serialization. I'm not sure yet how that would
> > look like yet.
> 
> Yeah, that is what I've tried to express earlier and that is why I would
> rather go with an uglier workaround for now and think about a more
> robust effective values calculation on top.
>  
> > I'm still not sure it's worth having a somewhat ugly workaround in
> > mem_cgroup_protection() to protect against half of the bug. If you
> > think so, the full problem should at least be documented and marked
> > XXX or something.
> 
> Yes, this makes sense to me. What about the following?
> diff --git a/include/linux/memcontrol.h b/include/linux/memcontrol.h
> index 1b4150ff64be..50ffbc17cdd8 100644
> --- a/include/linux/memcontrol.h
> +++ b/include/linux/memcontrol.h
> @@ -350,6 +350,42 @@ static inline unsigned long mem_cgroup_protection(struct mem_cgroup *memcg,
>  	if (mem_cgroup_disabled())
>  		return 0;
>  
> +	/*
> +	 * There is no reclaim protection applied to a targeted reclaim.
> +	 * We are special casing this specific case here because
> +	 * mem_cgroup_protected calculation is not robust enough to keep
> +	 * the protection invariant for calculated effective values for
> +	 * parallel reclaimers with different reclaim target. This is
> +	 * especially a problem for tail memcgs (as they have pages on LRU)
> +	 * which would want to have effective values 0 for targeted reclaim
> +	 * but a different value for external reclaim.
> +	 *
> +	 * Example
> +	 * Let's have global and A's reclaim in parallel:
> +	 *  |
> +	 *  A (low=2G, usage = 3G, max = 3G, children_low_usage = 1.5G)
> +	 *  |\
> +	 *  | C (low = 1G, usage = 2.5G)
> +	 *  B (low = 1G, usage = 0.5G)
> +	 *
> +	 * For the global reclaim
> +	 * A.elow = A.low
> +	 * B.elow = min(B.usage, B.low) because children_low_usage <= A.elow
> +	 * C.elow = min(C.usage, C.low)
> +	 *
> +	 * With the effective values resetting we have A reclaim
> +	 * A.elow = 0
> +	 * B.elow = B.low
> +	 * C.elow = C.low
> +	 *
> +	 * If the global reclaim races with A's reclaim then
> +	 * B.elow = C.elow = 0 because children_low_usage > A.elow)
> +	 * is possible and reclaiming B would be violating the protection.
> +	 *
> +	 */
> +	if (memcg == root)
> +		return 0;
> +
>  	if (in_low_reclaim)
>  		return READ_ONCE(memcg->memory.emin);
>  
> diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
> index 05b4ec2c6499..df88a22f09bc 100644
> --- a/mm/memcontrol.c
> +++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
> @@ -6385,6 +6385,14 @@ enum mem_cgroup_protection mem_cgroup_protected(struct mem_cgroup *root,
>  
>  	if (!root)
>  		root = root_mem_cgroup;
> +
> +	/*
> +	 * Effective values of the reclaim targets are ignored so they
> +	 * can be stale. Have a look at mem_cgroup_protection for more
> +	 * details.
> +	 * TODO: calculation should be more robust so that we do not need
> +	 * that special casing.
> +	 */
>  	if (memcg == root)
>  		return MEMCG_PROT_NONE;

Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>

Thanks!