Re: [PATCH v3 2/2] mm: memcg/slab: Create a new set of kmalloc-cg-<n> caches

[Waiman Long]

On 5/5/21 2:11 PM, Waiman Long wrote:
> On 5/5/21 1:30 PM, Roman Gushchin wrote:
>
> > Btw, I wonder if we also need a change in the slab caches merging 
> > procedure?
> > KMALLOC_NORMAL caches should not be merged with caches which can 
> > potentially
> > include accounted objects.
>
> Thank for catching this omission.
>
> I will take a look and modify the merging procedure in a new patch. 
> Accounting is usually specified at kmem_cache_create() time. Though, I 
> did find one instance of setting ACCOUNT flag in kmem_cache_alloc(), I 
> will ignore this case and merge accounted, but unreclaimable caches to 
> KMALLOC_CGROUP. 

In mm/slab_common.c:

#define SLAB_MERGE_SAME (SLAB_RECLAIM_ACCOUNT | SLAB_CACHE_DMA | \
                         SLAB_CACHE_DMA32 | SLAB_ACCOUNT)

struct kmem_cache *find_mergeable(unsigned int size, unsigned int align,
  :
                if ((flags & SLAB_MERGE_SAME) != (s->flags & 
SLAB_MERGE_SAME))
                        continue;

By making sure kmalloc-cg-* has SLAB_ACCOUNT bit set, a kmemcache 
created with with SLAB_ACCOUNT may merge with kmalloc-cg-* whereas one 
without SLAB_ACCOUNT may merge with kmalloc-* for now. So the current 
code should work fine for most cases. Though, if the ACCOUNT flag is set 
at kmem_cache_alloc() and the cache happens to be merged into kmalloc-*, 
we will have the rare case that an objcg pointer array may have to be 
added to a kmalloc-* cache. However, this is not a common practice, and 
the three cases (not one, sorry) that I found so far is in

arch/x86/kvm/x86.c:     ctxt = kmem_cache_zalloc(x86_emulator_cache, 
GFP_KERNEL_ACCOUNT);
fs/hostfs/hostfs_kern.c:        hi = 
kmem_cache_alloc(hostfs_inode_cache, GFP_KERNEL_ACCOUNT);
virt/kvm/kvm_main.c:    vcpu = kmem_cache_zalloc(kvm_vcpu_cache, 
GFP_KERNEL_ACCOUNT);

We will have to advise against doing that.

Cheers,
Longman