Re: [PATCH v3 1/6] mm/memcontrol: make lru_zone_size atomic and simplify sanity check

[Barry Song]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2026 at 1:53 AM Kairui Song via B4 Relay
<devnull+kasong.tencent.com@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> From: Kairui Song <kasong@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> commit ca707239e8a7 ("mm: update_lru_size warn and reset bad lru_size")
> introduced a sanity check to catch memcg counter underflow, which was
> more of a workaround for another bug: lru_zone_size is unsigned, so
> underflow wraps it around and returns an enormously large number, then
> the memcg shrinker loops almost forever as the calculated number of
> folios to shrink is huge. That commit also checked if a zero value
> matches the empty LRU list, so we have to hold the LRU lock, and
> handle the positive and negative deltas separately.
>
> But later commit b4536f0c829c ("mm, memcg: fix the active list aging
> for lowmem requests when memcg is enabled") already removed the LRU
> emptiness check, so handling the deltas separately is no longer
> needed. And if we just turn it into an atomic long, underflow isn't a
> big issue either, and can be checked at the reader side, which is
> called much less frequently than the updater.
>
> So let's turn the counter into an atomic long and check at the reader
> side instead, which has a smaller overhead. The underflow correction
> is removed: a massive leak of the LRU size counter would indicate
> that something else has gone very wrong, and one should fix that
> leaking site instead. Besides, the updater-side sanity check is
> unlikely to catch the leaking site anyway: if a folio was removed
> without updating the counter while other folios remain on the LRU,
> the WARN only triggers much later, from a likely innocent callsite.
>
> Reviewed-by: Ridong Chen <ridong.chen@xxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Kairui Song <kasong@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---

LGTM,
Reviewed-by: Barry Song <baohua@xxxxxxxxxx>