Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: memcontrol: use special workqueue for creating per-memcg caches

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Thu Oct 20 2016 - 23:45:04 EST


On Tue, 4 Oct 2016 16:14:17 +0300 Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Creating a lot of cgroups at the same time might stall all worker
> threads with kmem cache creation works, because kmem cache creation is
> done with the slab_mutex held. The problem was amplified by commits
> 801faf0db894 ("mm/slab: lockless decision to grow cache") in case of
> SLAB and 81ae6d03952c ("mm/slub.c: replace kick_all_cpus_sync() with
> synchronize_sched() in kmem_cache_shrink()") in case of SLUB, which
> increased the maximal time the slab_mutex can be held.
>
> To prevent that from happening, let's use a special ordered single
> threaded workqueue for kmem cache creation. This shouldn't introduce any
> functional changes regarding how kmem caches are created, as the work
> function holds the global slab_mutex during its whole runtime anyway,
> making it impossible to run more than one work at a time. By using a
> single threaded workqueue, we just avoid creating a thread per each
> work. Ordering is required to avoid a situation when a cgroup's work is
> put off indefinitely because there are other cgroups to serve, in other
> words to guarantee fairness.

I'm having trouble working out the urgency of this patch?