Re: [PATCH v1 23/26] mm: vmscan: prepare for reparenting MGLRU folios

Yuanchu Xie
2025-12-01T21:50:27Z

On Mon, Dec 1, 2025 at 9:41 AM Qi Zheng <qi.zheng@linux.dev> wrote:
> > Warning 1) Here we increment max_seq but we skip updating mm_state->seq.
> > (try_to_inc_max_seq() iterates the mm list and update mm_state->seq after
> > an iteration, but since we directly call inc_max_seq(), we don't update it)
> >
> > When mm_state->seq is more than one generation behind walk->seq, a warning is
> > triggered in iterate_mm_list():
> >
> > VM_WARN_ON_ONCE(mm_state->seq + 1 < walk->max_seq);
>
> The mm_state->seq is just to record the completion of a full traversal
> of mm_list. If we simply delete this warning, it may cause this judgment
> in iterate_mm_list to become invalid:
>
> if (walk->seq <= mm_state->seq)
> goto done;
>
> So it seems we can manually increase mm_state->seq during reparenting to
> avoid this warning.
Agreed, don't get rid of the warning as this check is supposed to make
stale walkers exit early.

>
> However, we cannot directly call iterate_mm_list_nowalk() because we do
> not want to reset mm_state->head and mm_state->tail to NULL. Otherwise,
> we wouldn't be able to continue iterating over the mm_list.
>

From the original posting:
> Of course, the same generation has different meanings in the parent and
> child memcg, this will cause confusion in the hot and cold information of
> folios. But other than that, this method is simple enough, the lru size
> is correct, and there is no need to consider some concurrency issues (such
> as lru_gen_del_folio()).
One way to solve this is to map generations based on
lrugen->timestamp, but of course this runs into the reading
folio->flags issue you described. I think the current method is a good
compromise, but the splicing of generations doesn't much make semantic
sense. It would be good to leave a comment somewhere in
__lru_gen_reparent_memcg to note this weirdness.