[PATCH v3 0/3] Try to release mmap_lock temporarily in smaps_rollup

Chinwen Chang
2020-08-15T06:21:39Z

Recently, we have observed some janky issues caused by unpleasantly long
contention on mmap_lock which is held by smaps_rollup when probing large
processes. To address the problem, we let smaps_rollup detect if anyone
wants to acquire mmap_lock for write attempts. If yes, just release the
lock temporarily to ease the contention.

smaps_rollup is a procfs interface which allows users to summarize the
process's memory usage without the overhead of seq_* calls. Android uses it
to sample the memory usage of various processes to balance its memory pool
sizes. If no one wants to take the lock for write requests, smaps_rollup
with this patch will behave like the original one.

Although there are on-going mmap_lock optimizations like range-based locks,
the lock applied to smaps_rollup would be the coarse one, which is hard to
avoid the occurrence of aforementioned issues. So the detection and
temporary release for write attempts on mmap_lock in smaps_rollup is still
necessary.

Change since v1:
- If current VMA is freed after dropping the lock, it will return
- incomplete result. To fix this issue, refine the code flow as
- suggested by Steve. [1]

Change since v2:
- When getting back the mmap lock, the address where you stopped last
- time could now be in the middle of a vma. Add one more check to handle
- this case as suggested by Michel. [2]

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/bf40676e-b14b-44cd-75ce-419c70194783@arm.com/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CANN689FtCsC71cjAjs0GPspOhgo_HRj+diWsoU1wr98YPktgWg@mail.gmail.com/

Chinwen Chang (3):
mmap locking API: add mmap_lock_is_contended()
mm: smaps*: extend smap_gather_stats to support specified beginning
mm: proc: smaps_rollup: do not stall write attempts on mmap_lock

fs/proc/task_mmu.c | 101 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
include/linux/mmap_lock.h | 5 ++
2 files changed, 96 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)