Re: [PATCH -mm 7/8] slub: make dead caches discard free slabs immediately

[Vladimir Davydov]

Hi Joonsoo,

On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 01:24:36PM +0900, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 03:04:58PM +0400, Vladimir Davydov wrote:
> > On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 09:57:10AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > > On Fri, 30 May 2014, Vladimir Davydov wrote:
> > > 
> > > > (3) is a bit more difficult, because slabs are added to per-cpu partial
> > > > lists lock-less. Fortunately, we only have to handle the __slab_free
> > > > case, because, as there shouldn't be any allocation requests dispatched
> > > > to a dead memcg cache, get_partial_node() should never be called. In
> > > > __slab_free we use cmpxchg to modify kmem_cache_cpu->partial (see
> > > > put_cpu_partial) so that setting ->partial to a special value, which
> > > > will make put_cpu_partial bail out, will do the trick.
[...]
> I think that we can do (3) easily.
> If we check memcg_cache_dead() in the end of put_cpu_partial() rather
> than in the begin of put_cpu_partial(), we can avoid the race you 
> mentioned. If someone do put_cpu_partial() before dead flag is set,
> it can be zapped by who set dead flag. And if someone do
> put_cpu_partial() after dead flag is set, it can be zapped by who
> do put_cpu_partial().

After put_cpu_partial() adds a frozen slab to a per cpu partial list,
the slab becomes visible to other threads, which means it can be
unfrozen and freed. The latter can trigger cache destruction. Hence we
shouldn't touch the cache, in particular call memcg_cache_dead() on it,
after calling put_cpu_partial(), otherwise we can get use-after-free.

However, what you propose makes sense if we disable irqs before adding a
slab to a partial list and enable them only after checking if the cache
is dead and unfreezing all partials if so, i.e.

diff --git a/mm/slub.c b/mm/slub.c
index d96faa2464c3..14b9e9a8677c 100644
--- a/mm/slub.c
+++ b/mm/slub.c
@@ -2030,8 +2030,15 @@ static void put_cpu_partial(struct kmem_cache *s, struct page *page, int drain)
 	struct page *oldpage;
 	int pages;
 	int pobjects;
+	unsigned long flags;
+	int irq_saved = 0;
 
 	do {
+		if (irq_saved) {
+			local_irq_restore(flags);
+			irq_saved = 0;
+		}
+
 		pages = 0;
 		pobjects = 0;
 		oldpage = this_cpu_read(s->cpu_slab->partial);
@@ -2062,8 +2069,16 @@ static void put_cpu_partial(struct kmem_cache *s, struct page *page, int drain)
 		page->pobjects = pobjects;
 		page->next = oldpage;
 
+		local_irq_save(flags);
+		irq_saved = 1;
+
 	} while (this_cpu_cmpxchg(s->cpu_slab->partial, oldpage, page)
 								!= oldpage);
+
+	if (memcg_cache_dead(s))
+		unfreeze_partials(s, this_cpu_ptr(s->cpu_slab));
+
+	local_irq_restore(flags);
 #endif
 }
 

That would be safe against possible cache destruction, because to remove
a slab from a per cpu partial list we have to run on the cpu it was
frozen on. Disabling irqs makes it impossible.

Christoph,

Does it look better to you? BTW, why can't we *always* disable irqs for
the whole put_cpu_partial()? That way handling dead caches there would
be trivial, and we wouldn't have to use this_cpu_cmpxchg().

Thanks.
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