The problem starts with a file backed dirty page which is charged to a
memcg. Then page migration is used to move oldpage to newpage.
Migration:
- copies the oldpage's data to newpage
- clears oldpage.PG_dirty
- sets newpage.PG_dirty
- uncharges oldpage from memcg
- charges newpage to memcg
Clearing oldpage.PG_dirty decrements the charged memcg's dirty page
count.
However, because newpage is not yet charged, setting newpage.PG_dirty
does not increment the memcg's dirty page count. After migration
completes newpage.PG_dirty is eventually cleared, often in
account_page_cleaned(). At this time newpage is charged to a memcg so
the memcg's dirty page count is decremented which causes underflow
because the count was not previously incremented by migration. This
underflow causes balance_dirty_pages() to see a very large unsigned
number of dirty memcg pages which leads to aggressive throttling of
buffered writes by processes in non root memcg.
This issue:
- can harm performance of non root memcg buffered writes.
- can report too small (even negative) values in
memory.stat[(total_)dirty] counters of all memcg, including the root.
To avoid polluting migrate.c with #ifdef CONFIG_MEMCG checks, introduce
page_memcg() and set_page_memcg() helpers.
Test:
0) setup and enter limited memcg
mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/test
echo 1G > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/memory.limit_in_bytes
echo $$ > /sys/fs/cgroup/test/cgroup.procs
1) buffered writes baseline
dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/tmp/foo bs=1M count=1k
sync
grep ^dirty /sys/fs/cgroup/test/memory.stat
2) buffered writes with compaction antagonist to induce migration
yes 1 > /proc/sys/vm/compact_memory &
rm -rf /data/tmp/foo
dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/tmp/foo bs=1M count=1k
kill %
sync
grep ^dirty /sys/fs/cgroup/test/memory.stat
3) buffered writes without antagonist, should match baseline
rm -rf /data/tmp/foo
dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/tmp/foo bs=1M count=1k
sync
grep ^dirty /sys/fs/cgroup/test/memory.stat
(speed, dirty residue)
unpatched patched
1) 841 MB/s 0 dirty pages 886 MB/s 0 dirty pages
2) 611 MB/s -33427456 dirty pages 793 MB/s 0 dirty pages
3) 114 MB/s -33427456 dirty pages 891 MB/s 0 dirty pages
Notice that unpatched baseline performance (1) fell after
migration (3): 841 -> 114 MB/s. In the patched kernel, post
migration performance matches baseline.
Fixes: c4843a7593 ("memcg: add per cgroup dirty page accounting")
Signed-off-by: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Reported-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> [4.2+]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
0610c25daa