While testing force_empty, during an exit_mmap, __mem_cgroup_remove_list
called from mem_cgroup_uncharge_page oopsed on a NULL pointer in the lru list.
I couldn't see what racing tasks on other cpus were doing, but surmise that
another must have been in mem_cgroup_charge_common on the same page, between
its unlock_page_cgroup and spin_lock_irqsave near done (thanks to that kzalloc
which I'd almost changed to a kmalloc).
Normally such a race cannot happen, the ref_cnt prevents it, the final
uncharge cannot race with the initial charge. But force_empty buggers the
ref_cnt, that's what it's all about; and thereafter forced pages are
vulnerable to races such as this (just think of a shared page also mapped into
an mm of another mem_cgroup than that just emptied). And remain vulnerable
until they're freed indefinitely later.
This patch just fixes the oops by moving the unlock_page_cgroups down below
adding to and removing from the list (only possible given the previous patch);
and while we're at it, we might as well make it an invariant that
page->page_cgroup is always set while pc is on lru.
But this behaviour of force_empty seems highly unsatisfactory to me: why have
a ref_cnt if we always have to cope with it being violated (as in the earlier
page migration patch). We may prefer force_empty to move pages to an orphan
mem_cgroup (could be the root, but better not), from which other cgroups could
recover them; we might need to reverse the locking again; but no time now for
such concerns.
projects / linux-2.6 / commit