Re: [PATCH 0/3] mm,thp,rmap: rework the use of subpages_mapcount

[Hugh Dickins]

On Mon, 21 Nov 2022, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 04:59:38PM +0000, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 18, 2022 at 01:08:13AM -0800, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> > > Linus was underwhelmed by the earlier compound mapcounts series:
> > > this series builds on top of it (as in next-20221117) to follow
> > > up on his suggestions - except rmap.c still using lock_page_memcg(),
> > > since I hesitate to steal the pleasure of deletion from Johannes.
> > 
> > Is there a plan to remove lock_page_memcg() altogether which I missed? I
> > am planning to make lock_page_memcg() a nop for cgroup-v2 (as it shows
> > up in the perf profile on exit path) but if we are removing it then I
> > should just wait.
> 
> We can remove it for rmap at least, but we might be able to do more.

I hope the calls from mm/rmap.c can be deleted before deciding the
bigger picture for lock_page_memcg() itself; getting rid of it would
be very nice, but it has always had a difficult job to do (and you've
devoted lots of good effort to minimizing it).

> 
> Besides rmap, we're left with the dirty and writeback page transitions
> that wrt cgroups need to be atomic with NR_FILE_DIRTY and NR_WRITEBACK.
> 
> Looking through the various callsites, I think we can delete it from
> setting and clearing dirty state, as we always hold the page lock (or
> the pte lock in some instances of folio_mark_dirty). Both of these are
> taken from the cgroup side, so we're good there.
> 
> I think we can also remove it when setting writeback, because those
> sites have the page locked as well.
> 
> That leaves clearing writeback. This can't hold the page lock due to
> the atomic context, so currently we need to take lock_page_memcg() as
> the lock of last resort.
> 
> I wonder if we can have cgroup take the xalock instead: writeback
> ending on file pages always acquires the xarray lock. Swap writeback
> currently doesn't, but we could make it so (swap_address_space).

It's a little bit of a regression to have to take that lock when
ending writeback on swap (compared with the rcu_read_lock() of almost
every lock_page_memcg()); but I suppose if swap had been doing that
all along, like the normal page cache case, I would not be complaining.

> 
> The only thing that gives me pause is the !mapping check in
> __folio_end_writeback. File and swapcache pages usually have mappings,
> and truncation waits for writeback to finish before axing
> page->mapping. So AFAICS this can only happen if we call end_writeback
> on something that isn't under writeback - in which case the test_clear
> will fail and we don't update the stats anyway. But I want to be sure.
> 
> Does anybody know from the top of their heads if a page under
> writeback could be without a mapping in some weird cornercase?

End of writeback has been a persistent troublemaker, in several ways;
I forget whether we are content with it now or not.

I would not trust whatever I think OTOH of that !mapping case, but I
was deeper into it two years ago, and find myself saying "Can mapping be
NULL? I don't see how, but allow for that with a WARN_ON_ONCE()" in a
patch I posted then (but it didn't go in, we went in another direction).

I'm pretty sure it never warned once for me, but I probably wasn't doing
enough to test it.  And IIRC I did also think that the !mapping check had
perhaps been copied from a related function, one where it made more sense.

It's also worth noting that the two stats which get decremented there,
NR_WRITEBACK and NR_ZONE_WRITE_PENDING, are two of the three which we
have commented "Skip checking stats known to go negative occasionally"
in mm/vmstat.c: I never did come up with a convincing explanation for
that (Roman had his explanation, but I wasn't quite convinced).
Maybe it would just be wrong to touch them if mapping were NULL.

> 
> If we could ensure that the NR_WRITEBACK decs are always protected by
> the xalock, we could grab it from mem_cgroup_move_account(), and then
> kill lock_page_memcg() altogether.

I suppose so (but I still feel grudging about the xalock for swap).

Hugh