Re: [PATCH] Repeated fork() causes SLAB to grow without bound

[Konstantin Khlebnikov <koct9i@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 2:14 AM, Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 8:58 AM, Konstantin Khlebnikov <koct9i@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 7:09 PM, Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> wrote:
>>> Also from reading http://lwn.net/Articles/383162/ I understand that correctness
>>> also depends on the hierarchy and I wonder if there's a danger of reintroducing
>>> a bug like the one described there.
>>
>> If I remember right that was fixed by linking non-exclusively mapped pages to
>> root anon_vma instead of anon_vma from vma where fault has happened.
>> After my patch this still works. Topology hierarchy actually isn't used.
>> Here just one selected "root' anon_vma which dies last. That's all.
>
> That's not how I remember it.

??? That at the end of lwn article:

[quote]
The fix is straightforward; when linking an existing page to an
anon_vma structure,
the kernel needs to pick the one which is highest in the process hierarchy;
that guarantees that the anon_vma will not go away prematurely.
[/quote]

nowdays this happens in __page_set_anon_rmap():

/*
* If the page isn't exclusively mapped into this vma,
* we must use the _oldest_ possible anon_vma for the
* page mapping!
*/
if (!exclusive)
    anon_vma = anon_vma->root;

The rest treeish of topology affects only performance.

>
> An anon_vma corresponds to a given vma V, and is used to track all
> vmas (V and descendant vmas) that may include a page that was
> originally mapped in V.
>
> Each anon page has a link to the anon_vma corresponding to the vma
> they were originally faulted in, and an offset indicating where the
> page was located relative to that original VMA.
>
> The anon_vma has an interval tree of struct anon_vma_chain, and each
> struct anon_vma_chain includes a link to a descendent-of-V vma. This
> allows rmap to quickly find all the vmas that may map a given page
> (based on the page's anon_vma and offset).
>
> When forking or splitting vmas, the new vma is a descendent of the
> same vmas as the old one so it must be added to all the anon_vma
> interval trees that were referencing the old one (that is, ancestors
> of the new vma). To that end, all the struct anon_vma_chain pointing
> to a given vma are kept on a linked list, and struct anon_vma_chain
> includes a link to the anon_vma holding the interval tree.
>
> Locking the entire structure is done with a single lock hosted in the
> root anon_vma (that is, a vma that was created by mmap() and not by
> cloning or forking existing vmas).
>
> Limit the length of the ancestors linked list is correct, though it
> has performance implications. In the extreme case, forcing all vmas to
> be added on the root vma's interval tree would be correct, though it
> may re-introduce the performance problems that lead to the
> introduction of anon_vma.
>
> The good thing about Konstantin's proposal is that it does not have
> any magic constant like mine did. However, I think he is mistaken in
> saying that hierarchy isn't used - an ancestor vma will always have
> more descendents than its children, and the reason for the hierarchy
> is to limit the number of vmas that rmap must explore.

I mean after breaking hierarchy whole structure stays correct and kernel
wouldn't explode, of course reusing anon_vma from ancestor makes
rmap walk less effective because newly allocated pages will get false
aliased vmas where they will never be mapped.


I'm thinking about limitation for reusing anon_vmas which might increase
performance without breaking asymptotic estimation of count anon_vma in
the worst case. For example this heuristic: allow to reuse only anon_vma
with single direct descendant. It seems there will be arount up to two times
more anon_vmas but false-aliasing must be much lower.



>
> --
> Michel "Walken" Lespinasse
> A program is never fully debugged until the last user dies.

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