Re: [PATCH] mm: memcontrol: prevent starvation when writing memory.high

[Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 09:03:22AM -0800, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 11:30:11AM -0500, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> > When a value is written to a cgroup's memory.high control file, the
> > write() context first tries to reclaim the cgroup to size before
> > putting the limit in place for the workload. Concurrent charges from
> > the workload can keep such a write() looping in reclaim indefinitely.
> > 
> > In the past, a write to memory.high would first put the limit in place
> > for the workload, then do targeted reclaim until the new limit has
> > been met - similar to how we do it for memory.max. This wasn't prone
> > to the described starvation issue. However, this sequence could cause
> > excessive latencies in the workload, when allocating threads could be
> > put into long penalty sleeps on the sudden memory.high overage created
> > by the write(), before that had a chance to work it off.
> > 
> > Now that memory_high_write() performs reclaim before enforcing the new
> > limit, reflect that the cgroup may well fail to converge due to
> > concurrent workload activity. Bail out of the loop after a few tries.
> > 
> > Fixes: 536d3bf261a2 ("mm: memcontrol: avoid workload stalls when lowering memory.high")
> > Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # 5.8+
> > Reported-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
> > Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
> > ---
> >  mm/memcontrol.c | 7 +++----
> >  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
> > 
> > diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
> > index 605f671203ef..63a8d47c1cd3 100644
> > --- a/mm/memcontrol.c
> > +++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
> > @@ -6275,7 +6275,6 @@ static ssize_t memory_high_write(struct kernfs_open_file *of,
> >  
> >  	for (;;) {
> >  		unsigned long nr_pages = page_counter_read(&memcg->memory);
> > -		unsigned long reclaimed;
> >  
> >  		if (nr_pages <= high)
> >  			break;
> > @@ -6289,10 +6288,10 @@ static ssize_t memory_high_write(struct kernfs_open_file *of,
> >  			continue;
> >  		}
> >  
> > -		reclaimed = try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages(memcg, nr_pages - high,
> > -							 GFP_KERNEL, true);
> > +		try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages(memcg, nr_pages - high,
> > +					     GFP_KERNEL, true);
> >  
> > -		if (!reclaimed && !nr_retries--)
> > +		if (!nr_retries--)
> 
> Shouldn't it be (!reclaimed || !nr_retries) instead?
> 
> If reclaimed == 0, it probably doesn't make much sense to retry.

We usually allow nr_retries worth of no-progress reclaim cycles to
make up for intermittent reclaim failures.

The difference to OOMs/memory.max is that we don't want to loop
indefinitely on forward progress, but we should allow the usual number
of no-progress loops.