Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm: zswap: remove unnecessary tree cleanups in zswap_swapoff()

[Chris Li]

Hi Yosry,

On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 11:59 PM Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 9:29 PM Chris Li <chriscli@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Yosry,
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 10:58 PM Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@googlecom> wrote:
> > >
> >
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for the great analysis, I missed the swapoff/swapon race myself :)
> > > >
> > > > The first solution that came to mind for me was refcounting the zswap
> > > > tree with RCU with percpu-refcount, similar to how cgroup refs are
> > > > handled (init in zswap_swapon() and kill in zswap_swapoff()). I think
> > > > the percpu-refcount may be an overkill in terms of memory usage
> > > > though. I think we can still do our own refcounting with RCU, but it
> > > > may be more complicated.
> > >
> > > FWIW, I was able to reproduce the problem in a vm with the following
> > > kernel diff:
> >
> > Thanks for the great find.
> >
> > I was worry about the usage after free situation in this email:
> >
> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAF8kJuOvOmn7wmKxoqpqSEk4gk63NtQG1Wc+Q0e9FZ9OFiUG6g@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
> >
> > Glad you are able to find a reproducible case. That is one of the
> > reasons I change the free to invalidate entries in my xarray patch.
> >
> > I think the swap_off code should remove the entry from the tree, just
> > wait for each zswap entry to drop to zero.  Then free it.
>
> This doesn't really help. The swapoff code is already removing all the
> entries from the trees before zswap_swapoff() is called through
> zswap_invalidate(). The race I described occurs because the writeback
> code is accessing the entries through the LRU, not the tree. The

Why?
Entry not in the tree is fine. What you describe is that, swap_off
code will not see the entry because it is already not in the tree.
The last one holding the reference count would free it.

> writeback code could have isolated a zswap entry from the LRU before
> swapoff, then tried to access it after swapoff. Although the zswap

The writeback should have a reference count to the zswap entry it
holds. The entry will not be free until the LRU is done and drop the
reference count to zero.

> entry itself is referenced and safe to use, accessing the tree to grab
> the tree lock and check if the entry is still in the tree is the
> problem.

The swap off should wait until all the LRU list from that tree has
been consumed before destroying the tree.
In swap off, it walks all the process MM anyway, walking all the memcg
and finding all the zswap entries in zswap LRU should solve that
problem.
Anyway, I think it is easier to reason about the behavior that way.
Swap off will take the extra hit, but not the normal access of the
tree.

>
> >
> > That way you shouldn't need to refcount the tree. The tree refcount is
> > effectively the combined refcount of all the zswap entries.
>
> The problem is that given a zswap entry, you have no way to stabilize
> the zswap tree before trying to deference it with the current code.
> Chengming's suggestion of moving the swap cache pin before accessing
> the tree seems like the right way to go.
>
> > Having refcount on the tree would be very high contention.
>
> A percpu refcount cannot be contended by definition :)

It still has overhead on the normal access path and memory
consumption. If we can avoid it, it would be a win.

Chris