Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm, memcg: Avoid stale protection values when cgroup is above protection

From: Chris Down
Date: Wed Apr 29 2020 - 21:46:08 EST


Yafang Shao writes:
My concern is why we add these barriers to memcg protection
specifically but don't add these barriers to the other memebers like
memcg->oom_group which has the same issue ?
What is the difference between these members and that members ?

There are certainly more missing cases -- I didn't look at oom_group specifically, but it sounds likely if there's not other mitigating factors. Most of us have just been busy and haven't had time to comprehensively fix all the potential store and load tears.

Tearing is another case of something that would be nice to fix once and for all in the memcg code, but isn't causing any significant issues for the timebeing. We should certainly aim to avoid introducing any new tearing opportunities, though :-)

So the answer is just that improvement is incremental and we've not had the time to track down and fix them all. If you find more cases, feel free to send out the patches and I'll be happy to take a look.