On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:34:36 +0400
Glauber Costa [off-list ref] wrote:

In the context of tracking kernel memory objects to a cgroup, the
following problem appears: we may need to destroy a cgroup, but
this does not guarantee that all objects inside the cache are dead.
This can't be guaranteed even if we shrink the cache beforehand.

The simple option is to simply leave the cache around. However,
intensive workloads may have generated a lot of objects and thus
the dead cache will live in memory for a long while.

Scanning the list of objects in the dead cache takes time, and
would probably require us to lock the free path of every objects
to make sure we're not racing against the update.

I decided to give a try to a different idea then - but I'd be
happy to pursue something else if you believe it would be better.

Upon memcg destruction, all the pages on the partial list
are moved to the new slab (usually the parent memcg, or root memcg)
When an object is freed, there are high stakes that no list locks
are needed - so this case poses no overhead. If list manipulation
is indeed needed, we can detect this case, and perform it
in the right slab.

If all pages were residing in the partial list, we can free
the cache right away. Otherwise, we do it when the last cache
leaves the full list.

How about starting from 'don't handle slabs on dead memcg' 
if shrink_slab() can find them....

This "move" complicates all implementation, I think...

Thanks,
-Kame

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