Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753251AbcJUDoi (ORCPT ); Thu, 20 Oct 2016 23:44:38 -0400 Received: from mail.linuxfoundation.org ([140.211.169.12]:40273 "EHLO mail.linuxfoundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751388AbcJUDog (ORCPT ); Thu, 20 Oct 2016 23:44:36 -0400 Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2016 20:44:35 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Vladimir Davydov Cc: Michal Hocko , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: memcontrol: use special workqueue for creating per-memcg caches Message-Id: <20161020204435.5e0ffca43c7b6ab5f69d692a@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <20161004131417.GC1862@esperanza> References: <20161003120641.GC26768@dhcp22.suse.cz> <20161003123505.GA1862@esperanza> <20161003131930.GE26768@dhcp22.suse.cz> <20161004131417.GC1862@esperanza> X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.4.1 (GTK+ 2.24.23; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1234 Lines: 21 On Tue, 4 Oct 2016 16:14:17 +0300 Vladimir Davydov wrote: > Creating a lot of cgroups at the same time might stall all worker > threads with kmem cache creation works, because kmem cache creation is > done with the slab_mutex held. The problem was amplified by commits > 801faf0db894 ("mm/slab: lockless decision to grow cache") in case of > SLAB and 81ae6d03952c ("mm/slub.c: replace kick_all_cpus_sync() with > synchronize_sched() in kmem_cache_shrink()") in case of SLUB, which > increased the maximal time the slab_mutex can be held. > > To prevent that from happening, let's use a special ordered single > threaded workqueue for kmem cache creation. This shouldn't introduce any > functional changes regarding how kmem caches are created, as the work > function holds the global slab_mutex during its whole runtime anyway, > making it impossible to run more than one work at a time. By using a > single threaded workqueue, we just avoid creating a thread per each > work. Ordering is required to avoid a situation when a cgroup's work is > put off indefinitely because there are other cgroups to serve, in other > words to guarantee fairness. I'm having trouble working out the urgency of this patch?