Re: [BUG] cgroup/workques/fork: deadlock when moving cgroups

[Tejun Heo]

Hello, Michal.

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 09:06:01AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> Tejun was proposing to do the migration async (move the whole
> mem_cgroup_move_charge into the work item). This would solve the problem
> of course. I haven't checked whether this would be safe but it at least
> sounds doable (albeit far from trivial). It would also be a user visible
> change because the new memcg will not contain the moved charges after we
> return to user space. I think this would be acceptable but if somebody

Not necessarily.  The only thing necessary is flushing the work item
after releasing locks but before returning to user.
cpuset_post_attach_flush() does exactly the same thing.

> really relies on the previous behavior I guess we can solve it with a
> post_move cgroup callback which would be called from a lockless context.
> 
> Anyway, before we go that way, can we at least consider the possibility
> of removing the kworker creation dependency on the global rwsem? AFAIU
> this locking was added because of the pid controller. Do we even care
> about something as volatile as kworkers in the pid controller?

It's not just pid controller and the global percpu locking has lower
hotpath overhead.  We can try to exclude kworkers out of the locking
but that can get really nasty and there are already attempts to add
cgroup support to workqueue.  Will think more about it.  For now tho,
do you think making charge moving async would be difficult?

Thanks.

-- 
tejun