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Date:   Fri, 6 Dec 2019 11:09:00 +0100
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
To:     Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc:     Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@virtuozzo.com>,
        Pavel Tikhomirov <ptikhomirov@virtuozzo.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, cgroups@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-mm@kvack.org, Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
        Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>,
        Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>,
        Chris Down <chris@chrisdown.name>,
        Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com>,
        Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        "Kirill A . Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>,
        Konstantin Khorenko <khorenko@virtuozzo.com>,
        Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@virtuozzo.com>,
        Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@hammerspace.com>,
        Anna Schumaker <anna.schumaker@netapp.com>,
        "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>,
        Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>,
        linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org,
        Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
        linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: fix hanging shrinker management on long
 do_shrink_slab
Message-ID: <20191206100900.GM28317@dhcp22.suse.cz>
References: <20191129214541.3110-1-ptikhomirov@virtuozzo.com>
 <4e2d959a-0b0e-30aa-59b4-8e37728e9793@virtuozzo.com>
 <20191206020953.GS2695@dread.disaster.area>
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On Fri 06-12-19 13:09:53, Dave Chinner wrote:
> [please cc me on future shrinker infrastructure modifications]
> 
> On Mon, Dec 02, 2019 at 07:36:03PM +0300, Andrey Ryabinin wrote:
> > 
> > On 11/30/19 12:45 AM, Pavel Tikhomirov wrote:
> > > We have a problem that shrinker_rwsem can be held for a long time for
> > > read in shrink_slab, at the same time any process which is trying to
> > > manage shrinkers hangs.
> > > 
> > > The shrinker_rwsem is taken in shrink_slab while traversing shrinker_list.
> > > It tries to shrink something on nfs (hard) but nfs server is dead at
> > > these moment already and rpc will never succeed. Generally any shrinker
> > > can take significant time to do_shrink_slab, so it's a bad idea to hold
> > > the list lock here.
> 
> registering/unregistering a shrinker is not a performance critical
> task.

We have had a bug report from production system which stumbled over a
long [u]nmount which was stuck on a shrinker {un}register path waiting for
the lock. This wouldn't be a big deal most of the time but [u]mount were
part of the login session in this case. This was on an older
distribution kernel and e496612c5130 ("mm: do not stall register_shrinker()")
helped a bit but not really for shrinkers that take a lot of time.

> If a shrinker is blocking for a long time, then we need to
> work to fix the shrinker implementation because blocking is a much
> bigger problem than just register/unregister.

Absolutely agreed here.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs