[PATCH 2/3] mm/memcg: fix endless iteration in reclaim

[Hugh Dickins]

On one home machine I can easily reproduce (by rmdir of memcgdir during
reclaim) multiple processes stuck looping forever in mem_cgroup_iter():
__mem_cgroup_iter_next() keeps selecting the memcg being destroyed, fails
to tryget it, returns NULL to mem_cgroup_iter(), which goes around again.

It's better to err on the side of leaving the loop too soon than never
when such races occur: once we've served prev (using root if none),
get out the next time __mem_cgroup_iter_next() cannot deliver.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
Securing the tree iterator against such races is difficult, I've
certainly got it wrong myself before.  Although the bug is real, and
deserves a Cc stable, you may want to play around with other solutions
before committing to this one.  The current iterator goes back to v3.12:
I'm really not sure if v3.11 was good or not - I never saw the problem
in the vanilla kernel, but with Google mods in we also had to make an
adjustment, there to stop __mem_cgroup_iter() being called endlessly
from the reclaim level.

 mm/memcontrol.c |    5 ++++-
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

--- mmotm/mm/memcontrol.c	2014-01-10 18:25:02.236448954 -0800
+++ linux/mm/memcontrol.c	2014-01-12 22:21:10.700570471 -0800
@@ -1254,8 +1252,11 @@ struct mem_cgroup *mem_cgroup_iter(struc
 				reclaim->generation = iter->generation;
 		}
 
-		if (prev && !memcg)
+		if (!memcg) {
+			if (!prev)
+				memcg = root;
 			goto out_unlock;
+		}
 	}
 out_unlock:
 	rcu_read_unlock();
--
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