Re: [PATCH v8 03/17] mm: Assign id to every memcg-aware shrinker

[Al Viro]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 10:47:44AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 08:46:28AM -0700, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 8:27 AM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > This will actually reduce the size of each shrinker and be more
> > > cache-efficient when calling the shrinkers.  I think we can also get
> > > rid of the shrinker_rwsem eventually, but let's leave it for now.
> > 
> > Can you explain how you envision shrinker_rwsem can be removed? I am
> > very much interested in doing that.
> 
> Sure.  Right now we have 3 uses of shrinker_rwsem -- two for adding and
> removing shrinkers to the list and one for walking the list.  If we switch
> to an IDR then we can use a spinlock for adding/removing shrinkers and
> the RCU read lock for looking up an entry in the IDR each iteration of
> the loop.
> 
> We'd need to stop the shrinker from disappearing underneath us while we
> drop the RCU lock, so we'd need a refcount in the shrinker, and to free
> the shrinkers using RCU.  We do similar things for other data structures,
> so this is all pretty well understood.

<censored>
struct super_block {
...
        struct shrinker s_shrink;       /* per-sb shrinker handle */
...
}
<censored>

What was that about refcount in the shrinker and taking over the lifetime
rules of the objects it might be embedded into, again?