vmscan: shrinker->nr updates race and go wrong
shrink_slab() allows shrinkers to be called in parallel so the
struct shrinker can be updated concurrently. It does not provide any
exclusio for such updates, so we can get the shrinker->nr value
increasing or decreasing incorrectly.
As a result, when a shrinker repeatedly returns a value of -1 (e.g.
a VFS shrinker called w/ GFP_NOFS), the shrinker->nr goes haywire,
sometimes updating with the scan count that wasn't used, sometimes
losing it altogether. Worse is when a shrinker does work and that
update is lost due to racy updates, which means the shrinker will do
the work again!
Fix this by making the total_scan calculations independent of
shrinker->nr, and making the shrinker->nr updates atomic w.r.t. to
other updates via cmpxchg loops.
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
1 file changed