Re: [v8 PATCH 03/13] mm: vmscan: use shrinker_rwsem to protect shrinker_maps allocation

On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 4:13 PM Yang Shi [off-list ref] wrote:

Since memcg_shrinker_map_size just can be changed under holding shrinker_rwsem
exclusively, the read side can be protected by holding read lock, so it sounds
superfluous to have a dedicated mutex.

Kirill Tkhai suggested use write lock since:

  * We want the assignment to shrinker_maps is visible for shrink_slab_memcg().
  * The rcu_dereference_protected() dereferrencing in shrink_slab_memcg(), but
    in case of we use READ lock in alloc_shrinker_maps(), the dereferrencing
    is not actually protected.
  * READ lock makes alloc_shrinker_info() racy against memory allocation fail.
    alloc_shrinker_info()->free_shrinker_info() may free memory right after
    shrink_slab_memcg() dereferenced it. You may say
    shrink_slab_memcg()->mem_cgroup_online() protects us from it? Yes, sure,
    but this is not the thing we want to remember in the future, since this
    spreads modularity.

And a test with heavy paging workload didn't show write lock makes things worse.

Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <redacted>
Acked-by: Kirill Tkhai <redacted>
Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Yang Shi <redacted>

Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt <redacted>