Re: [PATCH RFC v2 02/10] mm: Make shrink_slab() lockless

Kirill Tkhai
2018-08-09T10:58:38Z

On 09.08.2018 13:37, Tetsuo Handa wrote:
> On 2018/08/09 18:21, Kirill Tkhai wrote:
>> 2)SRCU. Pros are there are no the above problems; we will have completely unlocked and
>> scalable shrink_slab(). We will also have a possibility to avoid unregistering delays,
>> like I did for superblock shrinker. There will be full scalability.
>> Cons is enabling SRCU.
>>
>
> How unregistering delays can be avoided? Since you traverse all shrinkers
> using one shrinker_srcu, synchronize_srcu(&shrinker_srcu) will block
> unregistering threads until longest inflight srcu_read_lock() user calls
> srcu_read_unlock().

Yes, but we can do synchronize_srcu() from async work like I did for the further patches.
The only thing we need is to teach shrinker::count_objects() and shrinker::scan_objects()
be safe to be called on unregistering shrinker user. The next patches do this for superblock
shrinker.

> Unless you use per shrinker counter like below, I wonder whether
> unregistering delays can be avoided...
>
> https://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=151060909613004
> https://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=151060909713005

I'm afraid these atomic_{inc,dec}(&shrinker->nr_active) may regulary drop CPU caches
on another CPUs on some workloads. Also, synchronize_rcu() is also a heavy delay.