Re: [RFC PATCH 4/7] memcg: sleep during flushing stats in safe contexts

Yosry Ahmed
2023-03-23T16:01:58Z

On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 8:56 AM Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 04:00:34AM +0000, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> > @@ -644,26 +644,26 @@ static void __mem_cgroup_flush_stats(void)
> > return;
> >
> > flush_next_time = jiffies_64 + 2*FLUSH_TIME;
> > - cgroup_rstat_flush(root_mem_cgroup->css.cgroup, false);
> > + cgroup_rstat_flush(root_mem_cgroup->css.cgroup, may_sleep);
>
> How is it safe to call this with may_sleep=true when it's holding the
> stats_flush_lock?

stats_flush_lock is always called with trylock, it is only used today
so that we can skip flushing if another cpu is already doing a flush
(which is not 100% correct as they may have not finished flushing yet,
but that's orthogonal here). So I think it should be safe to sleep as
no one can be blocked waiting for this spinlock.

Perhaps it would be better semantically to replace the spinlock with
an atomic test and set, instead of having a lock that can only be used
with trylock?

>
> > atomic_set(&stats_flush_threshold, 0);
> > spin_unlock(&stats_flush_lock);
> > }