On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 10:31:32AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Thu 19-12-19 20:27:28, Roman Gushchin wrote:
Currently slab percpu vmstats are flushed twice: during the memcg offlining and just before freeing the memcg structure. Each time percpu counters are summed, added to the atomic counterparts and propagated up by the cgroup tree.
The second flushing is required due to how recursive vmstats are implemented: counters are batched in percpu variables on a local level, and once a percpu value is crossing some predefined threshold, it spills over to atomic values on the local and each ascendant levels. It means that without flushing some numbers cached in percpu variables will be dropped on floor each time a cgroup is destroyed. And with uptime the error on upper levels might become noticeable.
The first flushing aims to make counters on ancestor levels more precise. Dying cgroups may resume in the dying state for a long time. After kmem_cache reparenting which is performed during the offlining slab counters of the dying cgroup don't have any chances to be updated, because any slab operations will be performed on the parent level. It means that the inaccuracy caused by percpu batching will not decrease up to the final destruction of the cgroup. By the original idea flushing slab counters during the offlining should minimize the visible inaccuracy of slab counters on the parent level.
The problem is that percpu counters are not zeroed after the first flushing. So every cached percpu value is summed twice. It creates a small error (up to 32 pages per cpu, but usually less) which accumulates on parent cgroup level. After creating and destroying of thousands of child cgroups, slab counter on parent level can be way off the real value.
For now, let's just stop flushing slab counters on memcg offlining. It can't be done correctly without scheduling a work on each cpu: reading and zeroing it during css offlining can race with an asynchronous update, which doesn't expect values to be changed underneath.
With this change, slab counters on parent level will become eventually consistent. Once all dying children are gone, values are correct. And if not, the error is capped by 32 * NR_CPUS pages per dying cgroup.
It's not perfect, as slab are reparented, so any updates after the reparenting will happen on the parent level. It means that if a slab page was allocated, a counter on child level was bumped, then the page was reparented and freed, the annihilation of positive and negative counter values will not happen until the child cgroup is released. It makes slab counters different from others, and it might want us to implement flushing in a correct form again. But it's also a question of performance: scheduling a work on each cpu isn't free, and it's an open question if the benefit of having more accurate counters is worth it.
We might also consider flushing all counters on offlining, not only slab counters.
So let's fix the main problem now: make the slab counters eventually consistent, so at least the error won't grow with uptime (or more precisely the number of created and destroyed cgroups). And think about the accuracy of counters separately.
So this is essentially a revert, right? I have to say I was not a great fan of bee07b33db78 in the first place.
I have to admit, you were right!
v2: added a note to the changelog, asked by Johannes. Thanks!
Signed-off-by: Roman Gushchin guro@fb.com Fixes: bee07b33db78 ("mm: memcontrol: flush percpu slab vmstats on kmem offlining") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Acked-by: Johannes Weiner hannes@cmpxchg.org
Acked-by: Michal Hocko mhocko@suse.com
Thanks!