Re: [PATCH] vmscan: add barrier to prevent evictable page in unevictablelist

From: KOSAKI Motohiro
Date: Tue Sep 27 2011 - 22:19:22 EST


(2011/09/28 10:45), Minchan Kim wrote:
> When racing between putback_lru_page and shmem_unlock happens,
> progrom execution order is as follows, but clear_bit in processor #1
> could be reordered right before spin_unlock of processor #1.
> Then, the page would be stranded on the unevictable list.
>
> spin_lock
> SetPageLRU
> spin_unlock
> clear_bit(AS_UNEVICTABLE)
> spin_lock
> if PageLRU()
> if !test_bit(AS_UNEVICTABLE)
> move evictable list
> smp_mb
> if !test_bit(AS_UNEVICTABLE)
> move evictable list
> spin_unlock
>
> But, pagevec_lookup in scan_mapping_unevictable_pages has rcu_read_[un]lock so
> it could protect reordering before reaching test_bit(AS_UNEVICTABLE) on processor #1
> so this problem never happens. But it's a unexpected side effect and we should
> solve this problem properly.

Do we still need this after Hannes removes scan_mapping_unevictable_pages?


>
> This patch adds a barrier after mapping_clear_unevictable.
>
> side-note: I didn't meet this problem but just found during review.


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