Re: [PATCH v7 6/6] writeback, cgroup: release dying cgwbs by switching attached inodes

[Jan Kara]

On Thu 03-06-21 18:31:59, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> Asynchronously try to release dying cgwbs by switching attached inodes
> to the bdi's wb. It helps to get rid of per-cgroup writeback
> structures themselves and of pinned memory and block cgroups, which
> are significantly larger structures (mostly due to large per-cpu
> statistics data). This prevents memory waste and helps to avoid
> different scalability problems caused by large piles of dying cgroups.
> 
> Reuse the existing mechanism of inode switching used for foreign inode
> detection. To speed things up batch up to 115 inode switching in a
> single operation (the maximum number is selected so that the resulting
> struct inode_switch_wbs_context can fit into 1024 bytes). Because
> every switching consists of two steps divided by an RCU grace period,
> it would be too slow without batching. Please note that the whole
> batch counts as a single operation (when increasing/decreasing
> isw_nr_in_flight). This allows to keep umounting working (flush the
> switching queue), however prevents cleanups from consuming the whole
> switching quota and effectively blocking the frn switching.

Hum, your comment about unmount made me think... Isn't all that stuff racy?
generic_shutdown_super() has:
                sync_filesystem(sb);
                sb->s_flags &= ~SB_ACTIVE;

                cgroup_writeback_umount();

and cgroup_writeback_umount() is:
        if (atomic_read(&isw_nr_in_flight)) {
                /*
                 * Use rcu_barrier() to wait for all pending callbacks to
                 * ensure that all in-flight wb switches are in the workqueue.
                 */
                rcu_barrier();
                flush_workqueue(isw_wq);
	}

So we are clearly missing a smp_mb() here (likely in
cgroup_writeback_umount()) as clearing of SB_ACTIVE needs to be reliably
happing before atomic_read(&isw_nr_in_flight).

Also ...

> +bool cleanup_offline_cgwb(struct bdi_writeback *wb)
> +{
> +	struct inode_switch_wbs_context *isw;
> +	struct inode *inode;
> +	int nr;
> +	bool restart = false;
> +
> +	isw = kzalloc(sizeof(*isw) + WB_MAX_INODES_PER_ISW *
> +		      sizeof(struct inode *), GFP_KERNEL);
> +	if (!isw)
> +		return restart;
> +
> +	/* no need to call wb_get() here: bdi's root wb is not refcounted */
> +	isw->new_wb = &wb->bdi->wb;
> +
> +	nr = 0;
> +	spin_lock(&wb->list_lock);
> +	list_for_each_entry(inode, &wb->b_attached, i_io_list) {
> +		if (!inode_prepare_wbs_switch(inode, isw->new_wb))
> +			continue;
> +
> +		isw->inodes[nr++] = inode;
> +
> +		if (nr >= WB_MAX_INODES_PER_ISW - 1) {
> +			restart = true;
> +			break;
> +		}
> +	}
> +	spin_unlock(&wb->list_lock);
> +
> +	/* no attached inodes? bail out */
> +	if (nr == 0) {
> +		kfree(isw);
> +		return restart;
> +	}
> +
> +	/*
> +	 * In addition to synchronizing among switchers, I_WB_SWITCH tells
> +	 * the RCU protected stat update paths to grab the i_page
> +	 * lock so that stat transfer can synchronize against them.
> +	 * Let's continue after I_WB_SWITCH is guaranteed to be visible.
> +	 */
> +	INIT_RCU_WORK(&isw->work, inode_switch_wbs_work_fn);
> +	queue_rcu_work(isw_wq, &isw->work);
> +
> +	atomic_inc(&isw_nr_in_flight);

... the increment of isw_nr_in_flight needs to happen before we start to
grab any inodes. Otherwise unmount can pass past cgroup_writeback_umount()
while we are still holding inode references in cleanup_offline_cgwb() the
result will be "Busy inodes after unmount." message and use-after-free
issues (with inode->i_sb which gets freed).

Frankly, I think much safer option would be to wait in evict() for
I_WB_SWITCH similarly as we wait for I_SYNC (through
inode_wait_for_writeback()). And with that we can do away with
cgroup_writeback_umount() altogether. But I guess that's out of scope of
this series.

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxxx>
SUSE Labs, CR