Patch "mm: memcontrol: fix cgroup creation failure after many small jobs" has been added to the 4.6-stable tree

This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

mm: memcontrol: fix cgroup creation failure after many small jobs

to the 4.6-stable tree which can be found at:
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:
mm-memcontrol-fix-cgroup-creation-failure-after-many-small-jobs.patch
and it can be found in the queue-4.6 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <[email protected]> know about it.

From: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 15:44:57 -0700
Subject: mm: memcontrol: fix cgroup creation failure after many small jobs

From: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>

commit 73f576c04b9410ed19660f74f97521bee6e1c546 upstream.

The memory controller has quite a bit of state that usually outlives the cgroup and pins its CSS until said state disappears. At the same time it imposes a 16-bit limit on the CSS ID space to economically store IDs in the wild. Consequently, when we use cgroups to contain frequent but small and short-lived jobs that leave behind some page cache, we quickly run into the 64k limitations of outstanding CSSs. Creating a new cgroup fails with -ENOSPC while there are only a few, or even no user-visible cgroups in existence.

Although pinning CSSs past cgroup removal is common, there are only two instances that actually need an ID after a cgroup is deleted: cache shadow entries and swapout records.

Cache shadow entries reference the ID weakly and can deal with the CSS having disappeared when it's looked up later. They pose no hurdle.

Swap-out records do need to pin the css to hierarchically attribute swapins after the cgroup has been deleted; though the only pages that remain swapped out after offlining are tmpfs/shmem pages. And those references are under the user's control, so they are manageable.

This patch introduces a private 16-bit memcg ID and switches swap and cache shadow entries over to using that. This ID can then be recycled after offlining when the CSS remains pinned only by objects that don't specifically need it.

This script demonstrates the problem by faulting one cache page in a new cgroup and deleting it again:

  set -e
  mkdir -p pages
  for x in `seq 128000`; do
    [ $((x % 1000)) -eq 0 ] && echo $x
    mkdir /cgroup/foo
    echo $$ >/cgroup/foo/cgroup.procs
    echo trex >pages/$x
    echo $$ >/cgroup/cgroup.procs
    rmdir /cgroup/foo
  done

When run on an unpatched kernel, we eventually run out of possible IDs even though there are no visible cgroups:

[root@ham ~]# ./cssidstress.sh
[...]
65000
mkdir: cannot create directory '/cgroup/foo': No space left on device

After this patch, the IDs get released upon cgroup destruction and the cache and css objects get released once memory reclaim kicks in.

---
 include/linux/memcontrol.h |   25 +++++--------
 mm/memcontrol.c            |   82 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
 mm/slab_common.c           |    4 +-
 3 files changed, 87 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-)

@@ -97,6 +97,11 @@ enum mem_cgroup_events_target {
 #define MEM_CGROUP_ID_SHIFT	16
 #define MEM_CGROUP_ID_MAX	USHRT_MAX
 
+struct mem_cgroup_id {
+	int id;
+	atomic_t ref;
+};
+
 struct mem_cgroup_stat_cpu {
 	long count[MEMCG_NR_STAT];
 	unsigned long events[MEMCG_NR_EVENTS];

@@ -172,6 +177,9 @@ enum memcg_kmem_state {
 struct mem_cgroup {
 	struct cgroup_subsys_state css;
 
+	/* Private memcg ID. Used to ID objects that outlive the cgroup */
+	struct mem_cgroup_id id;
+
 	/* Accounted resources */
 	struct page_counter memory;
 	struct page_counter swap;

@@ -330,22 +338,9 @@ static inline unsigned short mem_cgroup_
 	if (mem_cgroup_disabled())
 		return 0;
 
-	return memcg->css.id;
-}
-
-/**
- * mem_cgroup_from_id - look up a memcg from an id
- * @id: the id to look up
- *
- * Caller must hold rcu_read_lock() and use css_tryget() as necessary.
- */
-static inline struct mem_cgroup *mem_cgroup_from_id(unsigned short id)
-{
-	struct cgroup_subsys_state *css;
-
-	css = css_from_id(id, &memory_cgrp_subsys);
-	return mem_cgroup_from_css(css);
+	return memcg->id.id;
 }
+struct mem_cgroup *mem_cgroup_from_id(unsigned short id);
 
 /**
  * parent_mem_cgroup - find the accounting parent of a memcg

@@ -526,8 +526,8 @@ void memcg_create_kmem_cache(struct mem_
 		goto out_unlock;
 
 	cgroup_name(css->cgroup, memcg_name_buf, sizeof(memcg_name_buf));
-	cache_name = kasprintf(GFP_KERNEL, "%s(%d:%s)", root_cache->name,
-			       css->id, memcg_name_buf);
+	cache_name = kasprintf(GFP_KERNEL, "%s(%llu:%s)", root_cache->name,
+			       css->serial_nr, memcg_name_buf);
 	if (!cache_name)
 		goto out_unlock;
 

Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are

queue-4.6/memcg-css_alloc-should-return-an-err_ptr-value-on-error.patch queue-4.6/memcg-mem_cgroup_migrate-may-be-called-with-irq-disabled.patch queue-4.6/mm-memcontrol-fix-cgroup-creation-failure-after-many-small-jobs.patch