Re: [PATCH v3 0/4] mm/slub: Fix count_partial() problem

[Xunlei Pang]

On 3/16/21 7:02 PM, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> On 3/16/21 11:42 AM, Xunlei Pang wrote:
>> On 3/16/21 2:49 AM, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
>>> On 3/9/21 4:25 PM, Xunlei Pang wrote:
>>>> count_partial() can hold n->list_lock spinlock for quite long, which
>>>> makes much trouble to the system. This series eliminate this problem.
>>>
>>> Before I check the details, I have two high-level comments:
>>>
>>> - patch 1 introduces some counting scheme that patch 4 then changes, could we do
>>> this in one step to avoid the churn?
>>>
>>> - the series addresses the concern that spinlock is being held, but doesn't
>>> address the fact that counting partial per-node slabs is not nearly enough if we
>>> want accurate <active_objs> in /proc/slabinfo because there are also percpu
>>> slabs and per-cpu partial slabs, where we don't track the free objects at all.
>>> So after this series while the readers of /proc/slabinfo won't block the
>>> spinlock, they will get the same garbage data as before. So Christoph is not
>>> wrong to say that we can just report active_objs == num_objs and it won't
>>> actually break any ABI.
>>
>> If maintainers don't mind this inaccuracy which I also doubt its
>> importance, then it becomes easy. For fear that some people who really
>> cares, introducing an extra config(default-off) for it would be a good
>> option.
> 
> Great.
> 
>>> At the same time somebody might actually want accurate object statistics at the
>>> expense of peak performance, and it would be nice to give them such option in
>>> SLUB. Right now we don't provide this accuracy even with CONFIG_SLUB_STATS,
>>> although that option provides many additional tuning stats, with additional
>>> overhead.
>>> So my proposal would be a new config for "accurate active objects" (or just tie
>>> it to CONFIG_SLUB_DEBUG?) that would extend the approach of percpu counters in
>>> patch 4 to all alloc/free, so that it includes percpu slabs. Without this config
>>> enabled, let's just report active_objs == num_objs.
>> For percpu slabs, the numbers can be retrieved from the existing
>> slub_percpu_partial()->pobjects, looks no need extra work.
> 
> Hm, unfortunately it's not that simple, the number there is a snapshot that can
> become wildly inacurate afterwards.
> 

It's hard to make it absoultely accurate using percpu, the data can
change during you iterating all the cpus and total_objects, I can't
imagine its real-world usage, not to mention the percpu freelist cache.
I think sysfs slabs_cpu_partial should work enough for common debug purpose.