Re: [patch] mm, writeback: prevent race when calculating dirty limits

From: Johannes Weiner
Date: Wed Jul 16 2014 - 23:57:52 EST


On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 05:36:49PM -0700, David Rientjes wrote:
> Setting vm_dirty_bytes and dirty_background_bytes is not protected by any
> serialization.
>
> Therefore, it's possible for either variable to change value after the
> test in global_dirty_limits() to determine whether available_memory needs
> to be initialized or not.
>
> Always ensure that available_memory is properly initialized.
>
> Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx>

Any such race should be barely noticable to the user, so I assume you
realized this while looking at the code? The patch looks good, but I
don't see that it's stable material.

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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