Re: Re: [PATCH net v2 0/2] Revert the 'socket_alloc' life cycle change

From: SeongJae Park
Date: Tue May 05 2020 - 11:08:18 EST


On Tue, 5 May 2020 07:53:39 -0700 Eric Dumazet <edumazet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 4:54 AM SeongJae Park <sjpark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > CC-ing stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and adding some more explanations.
> >
> > On Tue, 5 May 2020 10:10:33 +0200 SeongJae Park <sjpark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > From: SeongJae Park <sjpark@xxxxxxxxx>
> > >
> > > The commit 6d7855c54e1e ("sockfs: switch to ->free_inode()") made the
> > > deallocation of 'socket_alloc' to be done asynchronously using RCU, as
> > > same to 'sock.wq'. And the following commit 333f7909a857 ("coallocate
> > > socket_sq with socket itself") made those to have same life cycle.
> > >
> > > The changes made the code much more simple, but also made 'socket_alloc'
> > > live longer than before. For the reason, user programs intensively
> > > repeating allocations and deallocations of sockets could cause memory
> > > pressure on recent kernels.
> >
> > I found this problem on a production virtual machine utilizing 4GB memory while
> > running lebench[1]. The 'poll big' test of lebench opens 1000 sockets, polls
> > and closes those. This test is repeated 10,000 times. Therefore it should
> > consume only 1000 'socket_alloc' objects at once. As size of socket_alloc is
> > about 800 Bytes, it's only 800 KiB. However, on the recent kernels, it could
> > consume up to 10,000,000 objects (about 8 GiB). On the test machine, I
> > confirmed it consuming about 4GB of the system memory and results in OOM.
> >
> > [1] https://github.com/LinuxPerfStudy/LEBench
>
> To be fair, I have not backported Al patches to Google production
> kernels, nor I have tried this benchmark.
>
> Why do we have 10,000,000 objects around ? Could this be because of
> some RCU problem ?

Mainly because of a long RCU grace period, as you guess. I have no idea how
the grace period became so long in this case.

As my test machine was a virtual machine instance, I guess RCU readers
preemption[1] like problem might affected this.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc17/atc17-prasad.pdf

>
> Once Al patches reverted, do you have 10,000,000 sock_alloc around ?

Yes, both the old kernel that prior to Al's patches and the recent kernel
reverting the Al's patches didn't reproduce the problem.


Thanks,
SeongJae Park

>
> Thanks.
>
> >
> > >
> > > To avoid the problem, this commit reverts the changes.
> >
> > I also tried to make fixup rather than reverts, but I couldn't easily find
> > simple fixup. As the commits 6d7855c54e1e and 333f7909a857 were for code
> > refactoring rather than performance optimization, I thought introducing complex
> > fixup for this problem would make no sense. Meanwhile, the memory pressure
> > regression could affect real machines. To this end, I decided to quickly
> > revert the commits first and consider better refactoring later.
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> > SeongJae Park
> >
> > >
> > > SeongJae Park (2):
> > > Revert "coallocate socket_wq with socket itself"
> > > Revert "sockfs: switch to ->free_inode()"
> > >
> > > drivers/net/tap.c | 5 +++--
> > > drivers/net/tun.c | 8 +++++---
> > > include/linux/if_tap.h | 1 +
> > > include/linux/net.h | 4 ++--
> > > include/net/sock.h | 4 ++--
> > > net/core/sock.c | 2 +-
> > > net/socket.c | 23 ++++++++++++++++-------
> > > 7 files changed, 30 insertions(+), 17 deletions(-)
> > >
> > > --
> > > 2.17.1