2023-07-28 13:24:21

by Simon Horman

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 05/49] mm: shrinker: add infrastructure for dynamically allocating shrinker

On Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 04:04:18PM +0800, Qi Zheng wrote:
> Currently, the shrinker instances can be divided into the following three
> types:
>
> a) global shrinker instance statically defined in the kernel, such as
> workingset_shadow_shrinker.
>
> b) global shrinker instance statically defined in the kernel modules, such
> as mmu_shrinker in x86.
>
> c) shrinker instance embedded in other structures.
>
> For case a, the memory of shrinker instance is never freed. For case b,
> the memory of shrinker instance will be freed after synchronize_rcu() when
> the module is unloaded. For case c, the memory of shrinker instance will
> be freed along with the structure it is embedded in.
>
> In preparation for implementing lockless slab shrink, we need to
> dynamically allocate those shrinker instances in case c, then the memory
> can be dynamically freed alone by calling kfree_rcu().
>
> So this commit adds the following new APIs for dynamically allocating
> shrinker, and add a private_data field to struct shrinker to record and
> get the original embedded structure.
>
> 1. shrinker_alloc()
>
> Used to allocate shrinker instance itself and related memory, it will
> return a pointer to the shrinker instance on success and NULL on failure.
>
> 2. shrinker_register()
>
> Used to register the shrinker instance, which is same as the current
> register_shrinker_prepared().
>
> 3. shrinker_free()
>
> Used to unregister (if needed) and free the shrinker instance.
>
> In order to simplify shrinker-related APIs and make shrinker more
> independent of other kernel mechanisms, subsequent submissions will use
> the above API to convert all shrinkers (including case a and b) to
> dynamically allocated, and then remove all existing APIs.
>
> This will also have another advantage mentioned by Dave Chinner:
>
> ```
> The other advantage of this is that it will break all the existing
> out of tree code and third party modules using the old API and will
> no longer work with a kernel using lockless slab shrinkers. They
> need to break (both at the source and binary levels) to stop bad
> things from happening due to using uncoverted shrinkers in the new

nit: uncoverted -> unconverted

> setup.
> ```
>
> Signed-off-by: Qi Zheng <[email protected]>

...

> diff --git a/mm/shrinker_debug.c b/mm/shrinker_debug.c
> index f1becfd45853..506257585408 100644
> --- a/mm/shrinker_debug.c
> +++ b/mm/shrinker_debug.c
> @@ -191,6 +191,20 @@ int shrinker_debugfs_add(struct shrinker *shrinker)
> return 0;
> }
>
> +int shrinker_debugfs_name_alloc(struct shrinker *shrinker, const char *fmt,
> + va_list ap)
> +{
> + shrinker->name = kvasprintf_const(GFP_KERNEL, fmt, ap);
> +
> + return shrinker->name ? 0 : -ENOMEM;
> +}
> +
> +void shrinker_debugfs_name_free(struct shrinker *shrinker)
> +{
> + kfree_const(shrinker->name);
> + shrinker->name = NULL;
> +}
> +

These functions have no prototype in this file,
perhaps internal.h should be included?

> int shrinker_debugfs_rename(struct shrinker *shrinker, const char *fmt, ...)
> {
> struct dentry *entry;

...