Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 08:40:57 -0700
From: Anton Vorontsov <anton@enomsg.org>
To: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-mm@kvack.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] vmpressure: fix divide-by-0 in vmpressure_work_fn
Message-ID: <20130911154057.GA16765@teo>
References: <alpine.LNX.2.00.1309062254470.11420@eggly.anvils>
 <20130909110847.GB18056@dhcp22.suse.cz>
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On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 01:08:47PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Fri 06-09-13 22:59:16, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> > Hit divide-by-0 in vmpressure_work_fn(): checking vmpr->scanned before
> > taking the lock is not enough, we must check scanned afterwards too.
> 
> As vmpressure_work_fn seems the be the only place where we set scanned
> to 0 (except for the rare occasion when scanned overflows which
> would be really surprising) then the only possible way would be two
> vmpressure_work_fn racing over the same work item. system_wq is
> !WQ_NON_REENTRANT so one work item might be processed by multiple
> workers on different CPUs. This means that the vmpr->scanned check in
> the beginning of vmpressure_work_fn is inherently racy.
> 
> Hugh's patch fixes the issue obviously but doesn't it make more sense to
> move the initial vmpr->scanned check under the lock instead?
> 
> Anton, what was the initial motivation for the out of the lock
> check? Does it really optimize anything?

Thanks a lot for the explanation.

Answering your question: the idea was to minimize the lock section, but the
section is quite small anyway so I doubt that it makes any difference (during
development I could not measure any effect of vmpressure() calls in my system,
though the system itself was quite small).

I am happy with moving the check under the lock or moving the work into
its own WQ_NON_REENTRANT queue.

Anton
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