Re: [PATCH] mm: memcontrol: fix NR_WRITEBACK leak in memcg and system stats

[Shakeel Butt]

On Sat, Feb 3, 2018 at 12:23 AM, Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> After the ("a983b5ebee57 mm: memcontrol: fix excessive complexity in
> memory.stat reporting"), we observed slowly upward creeping
> NR_WRITEBACK counts over the course of several days, both the
> per-memcg stats as well as the system counter in e.g. /proc/meminfo.
>
> The conversion from full per-cpu stat counts to per-cpu cached atomic
> stat counts introduced an irq-unsafe RMW operation into the updates.
>
> Most stat updates come from process context, but one notable exception
> is the NR_WRITEBACK counter. While writebacks are issued from process
> context, they are retired from (soft)irq context.
>
> When writeback completions interrupt the RMW counter updates of new
> writebacks being issued, the decs from the completions are lost.
>
> Since the global updates are routed through the joint lruvec API, both
> the memcg counters as well as the system counters are affected.
>
> This patch makes the joint stat and event API irq safe.
>
> Fixes: a983b5ebee57 ("mm: memcontrol: fix excessive complexity in memory.stat reporting")
> Debugged-by: Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Should this be considered for stable?