Re: [PATCH V3 4/8] memcg: add per cgroup dirty pages accounting

From: Kamezawa Hiroyuki
Date: Mon Jan 07 2013 - 02:49:43 EST


(2013/01/07 5:02), Hugh Dickins wrote:
On Sat, 5 Jan 2013, Sha Zhengju wrote:
On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 6:44 PM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Maybe I have missed some other locking which would prevent this from
happening but the locking relations are really complicated in this area
so if mem_cgroup_{begin,end}_update_page_stat might be called
recursively then we need a fat comment which justifies that.


Ohhh...good catching! I didn't notice there is a recursive call of
mem_cgroup_{begin,end}_update_page_stat in page_remove_rmap().
The mem_cgroup_{begin,end}_update_page_stat() design has depressed
me a lot recently as the lock granularity is a little bigger than I thought.
Not only the resource but also some code logic is in the range of locking
which may be deadlock prone. The problem still exists if we are trying to
add stat account of other memcg page later, may I make bold to suggest
that we dig into the lock again...

Forgive me, I must confess I'm no more than skimming this thread,
and don't like dumping unsigned-off patches on people; but thought
that on balance it might be more helpful than not if I offer you a
patch I worked on around 3.6-rc2 (but have updated to 3.8-rc2 below).

I too was getting depressed by the constraints imposed by
mem_cgroup_{begin,end}_update_page_stat (good job though Kamezawa-san
did to minimize them), and wanted to replace by something freer, more
RCU-like. In the end it seemed more effort than it was worth to go
as far as I wanted, but I do think that this is some improvement over
what we currently have, and should deal with your recursion issue.

In what case does this improve performance ?

But if this does appear useful to memcg people, then we really ought
to get it checked over by locking/barrier experts before going further.
I think myself that I've over-barriered it, and could use a little
lighter; but they (Paul McKenney, Peter Zijlstra, Oleg Nesterov come
to mind) will see more clearly, and may just hate the whole thing,
as yet another peculiar lockdep-avoiding hand-crafted locking scheme.
I've not wanted to waste their time on reviewing it, if it's not even
going to be useful to memcg people.

It may be easier to understand if you just apply the patch and look
at the result in mm/memcontrol.c, where I tried to gather the pieces
together in one place and describe them ("These functions mediate...").

Hugh


Hi, this patch seems interesting but...doesn't this make move_account() very
slow if the number of cpus increases because of scanning all cpus per a page ?
And this looks like reader-can-block-writer percpu rwlock..it's too heavy to
writers if there are many readers.


Thanks,
-Kame










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