[PATCH] vhost_task: do the return-to-userspace work between work items
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HOTtoday
From: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev>
Date: 2026-10-31 18:10:41
Also in:
cgroups, kvm, linux-mmc, lkml, virtualization
Subsystem:
the rest, virtio host (vhost) · Maintainers:
Linus Torvalds, "Michael S. Tsirkin", Jason Wang, Eugenio Pérez
A vhost task is a user worker: a thread of a user process that runs only kernel code. It never returns to userspace, so it never runs the work that is queued for the way back. resume_user_mode_work() does that work when TIF_NOTIFY_RESUME is set. For a vhost task this means: - memory.high is handled at the wrong time. When a charge goes over memory.high, the task counts the pages, and should reclaim, and sleep if needed, on its way back to userspace. A vhost task only reclaims when more than a batch of pages has built up and the charge can block. Then it reclaims and sleeps in the middle of the charge, maybe while it holds a lock. vhost-scsi, for example, can fault in guest memory while it holds vq->mutex. If the charges can't block, nothing is done at all, and the count keeps growing. - Block cgroup throttling never runs. blkcg_schedule_throttle() asks for it, but only resume_user_mode_work() acts on it. - Task work queued with TWA_RESUME, like a deferred fput() or a NUMA balancing scan, waits until the task gets a signal or exits. io_uring workers had the same problem, and io_run_task_work() calls resume_user_mode_work() for them. Do the same in vhost_task_fn(): if TIF_NOTIFY_RESUME is set, call resume_user_mode_work() at the top of the loop. That is between work items, no locks are held there, and the task is running. Passing a NULL regs is fine, io_uring and KVM already do it. This covers every user of vhost_task_create(): the vhost workers and KVM's NX huge page recovery thread. Tested in a VM with a version of tools/virtio/vhost_net_test that puts each RX buffer on a new page, so the vhost worker faults in, and charges, 256M while its cgroup has memory.high=64M. Before, all 285 calls to __mem_cgroup_handle_over_high() came from try_charge_memcg(), inside handle_rx() with vq->mutex held. After, all 589 came from vhost_task_fn(). memory.peak stayed at 64M, and the run took about the same time (0.66s before, 0.67s after). A lockdep kernel showed no warnings. Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev> --- kernel/vhost_task.c | 9 +++++++++ 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+)
diff --git a/kernel/vhost_task.c b/kernel/vhost_task.c
index 3717885a5992..f0ab21aa2a1c 100644
--- a/kernel/vhost_task.c
+++ b/kernel/vhost_task.c@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ #include <linux/sched/task.h> #include <linux/sched/vhost_task.h> #include <linux/sched/signal.h> +#include <linux/resume_user_mode.h> enum vhost_task_flags { VHOST_TASK_FLAGS_STOP,
@@ -38,6 +39,14 @@ static int vhost_task_fn(void *data) break; } + /* + * A vhost task never returns to userspace. Do the work that + * would run on the way back, like memory.high reclaim, here + * between work items, while no locks are held. + */ + if (test_thread_flag(TIF_NOTIFY_RESUME)) + resume_user_mode_work(NULL); + /* mb paired w/ vhost_task_stop */ set_current_state(TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE);
--
2.53.0-Meta