On 11/13/2012 07:01 AM, Tejun Heo wrote:

cgroup->dentry is marked and used as a RCU pointer; however, it isn't
one - the final dentry put doesn't go through call_rcu().  cgroup and
dentry share the same RCU freeing rule via synchronize_rcu() in
cgroup_diput() (kfree_rcu() used on cgrp is unnecessary).  If cgrp is
accessible under RCU read lock, so is its dentry and dereferencing
cgrp->dentry doesn't need any further RCU protection or annotation.

While not being accurate, before the previous patch, the RCU accessors
served a purpose as memory barriers - cgroup->dentry used to be
assigned after the cgroup was made visible to cgroup_path(), so the
assignment and dereferencing in cgroup_path() needed the memory
barrier pair.  Now that list_add_tail_rcu() happens after
cgroup->dentry is assigned, this no longer is necessary.

Remove the now unnecessary and misleading RCU annotations from
cgroup->dentry.  To make up for the removal of rcu_dereference_check()
in cgroup_path(), add an explicit rcu_lockdep_assert(), which asserts
the dereference rule of @cgrp, not cgrp->dentry.

Will memcontrol.c need similar amendments?

The code that lives in -mm and includes kmemcg includes the following
excerpt:

        rcu_read_lock();
        dentry = rcu_dereference(memcg->css.cgroup->dentry);
        rcu_read_unlock();