On Wed, 10 Jan 2018 15:43:17 +0300 Andrey Ryabinin [off-list ref] wrote:

mem_cgroup_resize_[memsw]_limit() tries to free only 32 (SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX)
pages on each iteration. This makes practically impossible to decrease
limit of memory cgroup. Tasks could easily allocate back 32 pages,
so we can't reduce memory usage, and once retry_count reaches zero we return
-EBUSY.

Easy to reproduce the problem by running the following commands:

  mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test
  echo $$ >> /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test/tasks
  cat big_file > /dev/null &
  sleep 1 && echo $((100*1024*1024)) > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test/memory.limit_in_bytes
  -bash: echo: write error: Device or resource busy

Instead of relying on retry_count, keep retrying the reclaim until
the desired limit is reached or fail if the reclaim doesn't make
any progress or a signal is pending.

Is there any situation under which that mem_cgroup_resize_limit() can
get stuck semi-indefinitely in a livelockish state?  It isn't very
obvious that we're protected from this, so perhaps it would help to
have a comment which describes how loop termination is assured?