[PATCH v2 44/47] mm: shrinker: make global slab shrink lockless

Qi Zheng zhengqi.arch at bytedance.com
Wed Jul 26 02:14:09 PDT 2023


Hi Dave,

On 2023/7/26 16:08, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 24, 2023 at 05:43:51PM +0800, Qi Zheng wrote:
>> The shrinker_rwsem is a global read-write lock in shrinkers subsystem,
>> which protects most operations such as slab shrink, registration and
>> unregistration of shrinkers, etc. This can easily cause problems in the
>> following cases.
>>
>> 1) When the memory pressure is high and there are many filesystems
>>     mounted or unmounted at the same time, slab shrink will be affected
>>     (down_read_trylock() failed).
>>
>>     Such as the real workload mentioned by Kirill Tkhai:
>>
>>     ```
>>     One of the real workloads from my experience is start
>>     of an overcommitted node containing many starting
>>     containers after node crash (or many resuming containers
>>     after reboot for kernel update). In these cases memory
>>     pressure is huge, and the node goes round in long reclaim.
>>     ```
>>
>> 2) If a shrinker is blocked (such as the case mentioned
>>     in [1]) and a writer comes in (such as mount a fs),
>>     then this writer will be blocked and cause all
>>     subsequent shrinker-related operations to be blocked.
>>
>> Even if there is no competitor when shrinking slab, there may still be a
>> problem. The down_read_trylock() may become a perf hotspot with frequent
>> calls to shrink_slab(). Because of the poor multicore scalability of
>> atomic operations, this can lead to a significant drop in IPC
>> (instructions per cycle).
>>
>> We used to implement the lockless slab shrink with SRCU [2], but then
>> kernel test robot reported -88.8% regression in
>> stress-ng.ramfs.ops_per_sec test case [3], so we reverted it [4].
>>
>> This commit uses the refcount+RCU method [5] proposed by Dave Chinner
>> to re-implement the lockless global slab shrink. The memcg slab shrink is
>> handled in the subsequent patch.
>>
>> For now, all shrinker instances are converted to dynamically allocated and
>> will be freed by kfree_rcu(). So we can use rcu_read_{lock,unlock}() to
>> ensure that the shrinker instance is valid.
>>
>> And the shrinker instance will not be run again after unregistration. So
>> the structure that records the pointer of shrinker instance can be safely
>> freed without waiting for the RCU read-side critical section.
>>
>> In this way, while we implement the lockless slab shrink, we don't need to
>> be blocked in unregister_shrinker().
>>
>> The following are the test results:
>>
>> stress-ng --timeout 60 --times --verify --metrics-brief --ramfs 9 &
>>
>> 1) Before applying this patchset:
>>
>> setting to a 60 second run per stressor
>> dispatching hogs: 9 ramfs
>> stressor       bogo ops real time  usr time  sys time   bogo ops/s     bogo ops/s
>>                            (secs)    (secs)    (secs)   (real time) (usr+sys time)
>> ramfs            735238     60.00     12.37    363.70     12253.05        1955.08
>> for a 60.01s run time:
>>     1440.27s available CPU time
>>       12.36s user time   (  0.86%)
>>      363.70s system time ( 25.25%)
>>      376.06s total time  ( 26.11%)
>> load average: 10.79 4.47 1.69
>> passed: 9: ramfs (9)
>> failed: 0
>> skipped: 0
>> successful run completed in 60.01s (1 min, 0.01 secs)
>>
>> 2) After applying this patchset:
>>
>> setting to a 60 second run per stressor
>> dispatching hogs: 9 ramfs
>> stressor       bogo ops real time  usr time  sys time   bogo ops/s     bogo ops/s
>>                            (secs)    (secs)    (secs)   (real time) (usr+sys time)
>> ramfs            746677     60.00     12.22    367.75     12443.70        1965.13
>> for a 60.01s run time:
>>     1440.26s available CPU time
>>       12.21s user time   (  0.85%)
>>      367.75s system time ( 25.53%)
>>      379.96s total time  ( 26.38%)
>> load average: 8.37 2.48 0.86
>> passed: 9: ramfs (9)
>> failed: 0
>> skipped: 0
>> successful run completed in 60.01s (1 min, 0.01 secs)
>>
>> We can see that the ops/s has hardly changed.
>>
>> [1]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20191129214541.3110-1-ptikhomirov@virtuozzo.com/
>> [2]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230313112819.38938-1-zhengqi.arch@bytedance.com/
>> [3]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/202305230837.db2c233f-yujie.liu@intel.com/
>> [4]. https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230609081518.3039120-1-qi.zheng@linux.dev/
>> [5]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/ZIJhou1d55d4H1s0@dread.disaster.area/
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Qi Zheng <zhengqi.arch at bytedance.com>
>> ---
>>   include/linux/shrinker.h | 19 +++++++---
>>   mm/shrinker.c            | 75 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------
>>   mm/shrinker_debug.c      | 52 +++++++++++++++++++++-------
>>   3 files changed, 104 insertions(+), 42 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/include/linux/shrinker.h b/include/linux/shrinker.h
>> index 36977a70bebb..335da93cccee 100644
>> --- a/include/linux/shrinker.h
>> +++ b/include/linux/shrinker.h
>> @@ -4,6 +4,7 @@
>>   
>>   #include <linux/atomic.h>
>>   #include <linux/types.h>
>> +#include <linux/refcount.h>
>>   
>>   #define SHRINKER_UNIT_BITS	BITS_PER_LONG
>>   
>> @@ -86,6 +87,10 @@ struct shrinker {
>>   	long batch;	/* reclaim batch size, 0 = default */
>>   	int seeks;	/* seeks to recreate an obj */
>>   	unsigned flags;
>> +	bool registered;
>> +
>> +	refcount_t refcount;
>> +	struct rcu_head rcu;
>>   
>>   	void *private_data;
>>   
>> @@ -106,14 +111,13 @@ struct shrinker {
>>   #define DEFAULT_SEEKS 2 /* A good number if you don't know better. */
>>   
>>   /* Flags */
>> -#define SHRINKER_REGISTERED	(1 << 0)
>> -#define SHRINKER_NUMA_AWARE	(1 << 1)
>> -#define SHRINKER_MEMCG_AWARE	(1 << 2)
>> +#define SHRINKER_NUMA_AWARE	(1 << 0)
>> +#define SHRINKER_MEMCG_AWARE	(1 << 1)
>>   /*
>>    * It just makes sense when the shrinker is also MEMCG_AWARE for now,
>>    * non-MEMCG_AWARE shrinker should not have this flag set.
>>    */
>> -#define SHRINKER_NONSLAB	(1 << 3)
>> +#define SHRINKER_NONSLAB	(1 << 2)
>>   
>>   unsigned long shrink_slab(gfp_t gfp_mask, int nid, struct mem_cgroup *memcg,
>>   			  int priority);
>> @@ -122,6 +126,13 @@ void shrinker_free_non_registered(struct shrinker *shrinker);
>>   void shrinker_register(struct shrinker *shrinker);
>>   void shrinker_unregister(struct shrinker *shrinker);
>>   
>> +static inline bool shrinker_try_get(struct shrinker *shrinker)
>> +{
>> +	return READ_ONCE(shrinker->registered) &&
>> +	       refcount_inc_not_zero(&shrinker->refcount);
>> +}
> 
> Why do we care about shrinker->registered here? If we don't set
> the refcount to 1 until we have fully initialised everything, then
> the shrinker code can key entirely off the reference count and
> none of the lookup code needs to care about whether the shrinker is
> registered or not.

The purpose of checking shrinker->registered here is to stop running
shrinker after calling shrinker_free(), which can prevent the following
situations from happening:

CPU 0                 CPU 1

shrinker_try_get()

                        shrinker_try_get()

shrinker_put()
shrinker_try_get()
                        shrinker_put()

This chance of this happening is small, but theoretically possible, so
I added this check.

> 
>> +void shrinker_put(struct shrinker *shrinker);
>> +
>>   #ifdef CONFIG_SHRINKER_DEBUG
>>   extern int shrinker_debugfs_add(struct shrinker *shrinker);
>>   extern struct dentry *shrinker_debugfs_detach(struct shrinker *shrinker,
>> diff --git a/mm/shrinker.c b/mm/shrinker.c
>> index 8a1fe844f1a4..8e3334749552 100644
>> --- a/mm/shrinker.c
>> +++ b/mm/shrinker.c
>> @@ -2,10 +2,13 @@
>>   #include <linux/memcontrol.h>
>>   #include <linux/rwsem.h>
>>   #include <linux/shrinker.h>
>> +#include <linux/rculist.h>
>> +#include <linux/spinlock.h>
>>   #include <trace/events/vmscan.h>
>>   
>>   LIST_HEAD(shrinker_list);
>>   DECLARE_RWSEM(shrinker_rwsem);
>> +DEFINE_SPINLOCK(shrinker_lock);
>>   
>>   #ifdef CONFIG_MEMCG
>>   static int shrinker_nr_max;
>> @@ -450,6 +453,18 @@ static unsigned long do_shrink_slab(struct shrink_control *shrinkctl,
>>   	return freed;
>>   }
>>   
>> +void shrinker_put(struct shrinker *shrinker)
>> +{
>> +	if (refcount_dec_and_test(&shrinker->refcount)) {
>> +		spin_lock(&shrinker_lock);
>> +		list_del_rcu(&shrinker->list);
>> +		spin_unlock(&shrinker_lock);
>> +
>> +		kfree(shrinker->nr_deferred);
>> +		kfree_rcu(shrinker, rcu);
>> +	}
>> +}
> 
> Urk, no.
> 
> We want the shrinker_free() code to block waiting for the shrinker
> reference count to go to zero, because the shrinkers can reference
> structures that are associated with the path that is freeing the
> shrinker.
> 
> i.e. we do not want to free the superblock of a filesystem whilst
> the shrinker is still running, but the way you've done this is that
> the shrinker can run whilst the structure that contains it has been
> torn down.

Oh, I missed this. I will change it back to use completion as soon as
possible.

> 
> This should use a completion, then it is always safe under
> rcu_read_lock().  This also gets rid of the shrinker_lock spin lock,
> which only exists because we can't take a blocking lock under
> rcu_read_lock(). i.e:
> 
> 
> void shrinker_put(struct shrinker *shrinker)
> {
> 	if (refcount_dec_and_test(&shrinker->refcount))
> 		complete(&shrinker->done);
> }
> 
> void shrinker_free()
> {
> 	.....
> 	refcount_dec(&shrinker->refcount);

I guess what you mean is shrinker_put(), because here may be the last
refcount.

> 	wait_for_completion(&shrinker->done);
> 	/*
> 	 * lookups on the shrinker will now all fail as refcount has
> 	 * fallen to zero. We can now remove it from the lists and
> 	 * free it.
> 	 */
> 	down_write(shrinker_rwsem);
> 	list_del_rcu(&shrinker->list);
> 	up_write(&shrinker_rwsem);
> 	call_rcu(shrinker->rcu_head, shrinker_free_rcu_cb);
> }
> 
> ....
> 
>> @@ -686,11 +711,14 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL(shrinker_free_non_registered);
>>   
>>   void shrinker_register(struct shrinker *shrinker)
>>   {
>> -	down_write(&shrinker_rwsem);
>> -	list_add_tail(&shrinker->list, &shrinker_list);
>> -	shrinker->flags |= SHRINKER_REGISTERED;
>> +	refcount_set(&shrinker->refcount, 1);
>> +
>> +	spin_lock(&shrinker_lock);
>> +	list_add_tail_rcu(&shrinker->list, &shrinker_list);
>> +	spin_unlock(&shrinker_lock);
>> +
>>   	shrinker_debugfs_add(shrinker);
>> -	up_write(&shrinker_rwsem);
>> +	WRITE_ONCE(shrinker->registered, true);
>>   }
>>   EXPORT_SYMBOL(shrinker_register);
> 
> This just looks wrong - you are trying to use WRITE_ONCE() as a
> release barrier to indicate that the shrinker is now set up fully.
> That's not necessary - the refcount is an atomic and along with the
> rcu locks they should provides all the barriers we need. i.e.

The reason I used WRITE_ONCE() here is because the shrinker->registered
will be read and written concurrently (read in shrinker_try_get() and
written in shrinker_free()), which is why I added shrinker::registered
field instead of using SHRINKER_REGISTERED flag (this can reduce the
addition of WRITE_ONCE()/READ_ONCE()).

> 
> void shrinker_register(struct shrinker *shrinker)
> {
> 	down_write(&shrinker_rwsem);
> 	list_add_tail_rcu(&shrinker->list, &shrinker_list);
> 	shrinker->flags |= SHRINKER_REGISTERED;
> 	shrinker_debugfs_add(shrinker);
> 	up_write(&shrinker_rwsem);
> 
> 	/*
> 	 * now the shrinker is fully set up, take the first
> 	 * reference to it to indicate that lookup operations are
> 	 * now allowed to use it via shrinker_try_get().
> 	 */
> 	refcount_set(&shrinker->refcount, 1);
> }
> 
>> diff --git a/mm/shrinker_debug.c b/mm/shrinker_debug.c
>> index f1becfd45853..c5573066adbf 100644
>> --- a/mm/shrinker_debug.c
>> +++ b/mm/shrinker_debug.c
>> @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@
>>   #include <linux/seq_file.h>
>>   #include <linux/shrinker.h>
>>   #include <linux/memcontrol.h>
>> +#include <linux/rculist.h>
>>   
>>   /* defined in vmscan.c */
>>   extern struct rw_semaphore shrinker_rwsem;
>> @@ -161,17 +162,21 @@ int shrinker_debugfs_add(struct shrinker *shrinker)
>>   {
>>   	struct dentry *entry;
>>   	char buf[128];
>> -	int id;
>> -
>> -	lockdep_assert_held(&shrinker_rwsem);
>> +	int id, ret = 0;
>>   
>>   	/* debugfs isn't initialized yet, add debugfs entries later. */
>>   	if (!shrinker_debugfs_root)
>>   		return 0;
>>   
>> +	down_write(&shrinker_rwsem);
>> +	if (shrinker->debugfs_entry)
>> +		goto fail;
>> +
>>   	id = ida_alloc(&shrinker_debugfs_ida, GFP_KERNEL);
>> -	if (id < 0)
>> -		return id;
>> +	if (id < 0) {
>> +		ret = id;
>> +		goto fail;
>> +	}
>>   	shrinker->debugfs_id = id;
>>   
>>   	snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "%s-%d", shrinker->name, id);
>> @@ -180,7 +185,8 @@ int shrinker_debugfs_add(struct shrinker *shrinker)
>>   	entry = debugfs_create_dir(buf, shrinker_debugfs_root);
>>   	if (IS_ERR(entry)) {
>>   		ida_free(&shrinker_debugfs_ida, id);
>> -		return PTR_ERR(entry);
>> +		ret = PTR_ERR(entry);
>> +		goto fail;
>>   	}
>>   	shrinker->debugfs_entry = entry;
>>   
>> @@ -188,7 +194,10 @@ int shrinker_debugfs_add(struct shrinker *shrinker)
>>   			    &shrinker_debugfs_count_fops);
>>   	debugfs_create_file("scan", 0220, entry, shrinker,
>>   			    &shrinker_debugfs_scan_fops);
>> -	return 0;
>> +
>> +fail:
>> +	up_write(&shrinker_rwsem);
>> +	return ret;
>>   }
>>   
>>   int shrinker_debugfs_rename(struct shrinker *shrinker, const char *fmt, ...)
>> @@ -243,6 +252,11 @@ struct dentry *shrinker_debugfs_detach(struct shrinker *shrinker,
>>   	shrinker->name = NULL;
>>   
>>   	*debugfs_id = entry ? shrinker->debugfs_id : -1;
>> +	/*
>> +	 * Ensure that shrinker->registered has been set to false before
>> +	 * shrinker->debugfs_entry is set to NULL.
>> +	 */
>> +	smp_wmb();
>>   	shrinker->debugfs_entry = NULL;
>>   
>>   	return entry;
>> @@ -266,14 +280,26 @@ static int __init shrinker_debugfs_init(void)
>>   	shrinker_debugfs_root = dentry;
>>   
>>   	/* Create debugfs entries for shrinkers registered at boot */
>> -	down_write(&shrinker_rwsem);
>> -	list_for_each_entry(shrinker, &shrinker_list, list)
>> +	rcu_read_lock();
>> +	list_for_each_entry_rcu(shrinker, &shrinker_list, list) {
>> +		if (!shrinker_try_get(shrinker))
>> +			continue;
>> +		rcu_read_unlock();
>> +
>>   		if (!shrinker->debugfs_entry) {
>> -			ret = shrinker_debugfs_add(shrinker);
>> -			if (ret)
>> -				break;
>> +			/* Paired with smp_wmb() in shrinker_debugfs_detach() */
>> +			smp_rmb();
>> +			if (READ_ONCE(shrinker->registered))
>> +				ret = shrinker_debugfs_add(shrinker);
>>   		}
>> -	up_write(&shrinker_rwsem);
>> +
>> +		rcu_read_lock();
>> +		shrinker_put(shrinker);
>> +
>> +		if (ret)
>> +			break;
>> +	}
>> +	rcu_read_unlock();
>>   
>>   	return ret;
>>   }
> 
> And all this churn and complexity can go away because the
> shrinker_rwsem is still used to protect shrinker_register()
> entirely....

My consideration is that during this process, there may be a
driver probe failure and then shrinker_free() is called (the
shrinker_debugfs_init() is called in late_initcall stage). In
this case, we need to use RCU+refcount to ensure that the shrinker
is not freed.

And after switching back to using completion, the smp_rmb()/smp_wmb()
is no longer needed.

Thanks,
Qi

> 
> -Dave.



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