linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] mm: fix hanging shrinker management on long do_shrink

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Date:   Fri, 6 Dec 2019 11:09:00 +0100
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
To:     Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
Cc:     Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@...tuozzo.com>,
        Pavel Tikhomirov <ptikhomirov@...tuozzo.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, cgroups@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-mm@...ck.org, Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@...il.com>,
        Roman Gushchin <guro@...com>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@...gle.com>,
        Chris Down <chris@...isdown.name>,
        Yang Shi <yang.shi@...ux.alibaba.com>,
        Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        "Kirill A . Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@...ux.intel.com>,
        Konstantin Khorenko <khorenko@...tuozzo.com>,
        Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@...tuozzo.com>,
        Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@...merspace.com>,
        Anna Schumaker <anna.schumaker@...app.com>,
        "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@...ldses.org>,
        Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@...cle.com>,
        linux-nfs@...r.kernel.org,
        Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: fix hanging shrinker management on long
 do_shrink_slab

On Fri 06-12-19 13:09:53, Dave Chinner wrote:
> [please cc me on future shrinker infrastructure modifications]
> 
> On Mon, Dec 02, 2019 at 07:36:03PM +0300, Andrey Ryabinin wrote:
> > 
> > On 11/30/19 12:45 AM, Pavel Tikhomirov wrote:
> > > We have a problem that shrinker_rwsem can be held for a long time for
> > > read in shrink_slab, at the same time any process which is trying to
> > > manage shrinkers hangs.
> > > 
> > > The shrinker_rwsem is taken in shrink_slab while traversing shrinker_list.
> > > It tries to shrink something on nfs (hard) but nfs server is dead at
> > > these moment already and rpc will never succeed. Generally any shrinker
> > > can take significant time to do_shrink_slab, so it's a bad idea to hold
> > > the list lock here.
> 
> registering/unregistering a shrinker is not a performance critical
> task.

We have had a bug report from production system which stumbled over a
long [u]nmount which was stuck on a shrinker {un}register path waiting for
the lock. This wouldn't be a big deal most of the time but [u]mount were
part of the login session in this case. This was on an older
distribution kernel and e496612c5130 ("mm: do not stall register_shrinker()")
helped a bit but not really for shrinkers that take a lot of time.

> If a shrinker is blocking for a long time, then we need to
> work to fix the shrinker implementation because blocking is a much
> bigger problem than just register/unregister.

Absolutely agreed here.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs