mm: memcg: fix stale protection of reclaim target memcg

Patch series "mm: memcg: fix protection of reclaim target memcg", v3.

This series fixes a bug in calculating the protection of the reclaim
target memcg where we end up using stale effective protection values from
the last reclaim operation, instead of completely ignoring the protection
of the reclaim target as intended.  More detailed explanation and examples
in patch 1, which includes the fix.  Patches 2 & 3 introduce a selftest
case that catches the bug.


This patch (of 3):

When we are doing memcg reclaim, the intended behavior is that we
ignore any protection (memory.min, memory.low) of the target memcg (but
not its children).  Ever since the patch pointed to by the "Fixes" tag,
we actually read a stale value for the target memcg protection when
deciding whether to skip the memcg or not because it is protected.  If
the stale value happens to be high enough, we don't reclaim from the
target memcg.

Essentially, in some cases we may falsely skip reclaiming from the
target memcg of reclaim because we read a stale protection value from
last time we reclaimed from it.


During reclaim, mem_cgroup_calculate_protection() is used to determine the
effective protection (emin and elow) values of a memcg.  The protection of
the reclaim target is ignored, but we cannot set their effective
protection to 0 due to a limitation of the current implementation (see
comment in mem_cgroup_protection()).  Instead, we leave their effective
protection values unchaged, and later ignore it in
mem_cgroup_protection().

However, mem_cgroup_protection() is called later in
shrink_lruvec()->get_scan_count(), which is after the
mem_cgroup_below_{min/low}() checks in shrink_node_memcgs().  As a result,
the stale effective protection values of the target memcg may lead us to
skip reclaiming from the target memcg entirely, before calling
shrink_lruvec().  This can be even worse with recursive protection, where
the stale target memcg protection can be higher than its standalone
protection.  See two examples below (a similar version of example (a) is
added to test_memcontrol in a later patch).

(a) A simple example with proactive reclaim is as follows. Consider the
following hierarchy:
ROOT
 |
 A
 |
 B (memory.min = 10M)

Consider the following scenario:
- B has memory.current = 10M.
- The system undergoes global reclaim (or memcg reclaim in A).
- In shrink_node_memcgs():
  - mem_cgroup_calculate_protection() calculates the effective min (emin)
    of B as 10M.
  - mem_cgroup_below_min() returns true for B, we do not reclaim from B.
- Now if we want to reclaim 5M from B using proactive reclaim
  (memory.reclaim), we should be able to, as the protection of the
  target memcg should be ignored.
- In shrink_node_memcgs():
  - mem_cgroup_calculate_protection() immediately returns for B without
    doing anything, as B is the target memcg, relying on
    mem_cgroup_protection() to ignore B's stale effective min (still 10M).
  - mem_cgroup_below_min() reads the stale effective min for B and we
    skip it instead of ignoring its protection as intended, as we never
    reach mem_cgroup_protection().

(b) An more complex example with recursive protection is as follows.
Consider the following hierarchy with memory_recursiveprot:
ROOT
 |
 A (memory.min = 50M)
 |
 B (memory.min = 10M, memory.high = 40M)

Consider the following scenario:
- B has memory.current = 35M.
- The system undergoes global reclaim (target memcg is NULL).
- B will have an effective min of 50M (all of A's unclaimed protection).
- B will not be reclaimed from.
- Now allocate 10M more memory in B, pushing it above it's high limit.
- The system undergoes memcg reclaim from B (target memcg is B).
- Like example (a), we do nothing in mem_cgroup_calculate_protection(),
  then call mem_cgroup_below_min(), which will read the stale effective
  min for B (50M) and skip it. In this case, it's even worse because we
  are not just considering B's standalone protection (10M), but we are
  reading a much higher stale protection (50M) which will cause us to not
  reclaim from B at all.

This is an artifact of commit 45c7f7e1ef17 ("mm, memcg: decouple
e{low,min} state mutations from protection checks") which made
mem_cgroup_calculate_protection() only change the state without returning
any value.  Before that commit, we used to return MEMCG_PROT_NONE for the
target memcg, which would cause us to skip the
mem_cgroup_below_{min/low}() checks.  After that commit we do not return
anything and we end up checking the min & low effective protections for
the target memcg, which are stale.

Update mem_cgroup_supports_protection() to also check if we are reclaiming
from the target, and rename it to mem_cgroup_unprotected() (now returns
true if we should not protect the memcg, much simpler logic).

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20221202031512.1365483-1-yosryahmed@google.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20221202031512.1365483-2-yosryahmed@google.com
Fixes: 45c7f7e1ef17 ("mm, memcg: decouple e{low,min} state mutations from protection checks")
Signed-off-by: Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>
Cc: Chris Down <chris@chrisdown.name>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Muchun Song <songmuchun@bytedance.com>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Vasily Averin <vasily.averin@linux.dev>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 9356a3ee639c..dcd476a66a59 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -4513,7 +4513,7 @@ static bool age_lruvec(struct lruvec *lruvec, struct scan_control *sc, unsigned
 
 	mem_cgroup_calculate_protection(NULL, memcg);
 
-	if (mem_cgroup_below_min(memcg))
+	if (mem_cgroup_below_min(NULL, memcg))
 		return false;
 
 	need_aging = should_run_aging(lruvec, max_seq, min_seq, sc, swappiness, &nr_to_scan);
@@ -5100,8 +5100,9 @@ static unsigned long get_nr_to_scan(struct lruvec *lruvec, struct scan_control *
 	DEFINE_MAX_SEQ(lruvec);
 	DEFINE_MIN_SEQ(lruvec);
 
-	if (mem_cgroup_below_min(memcg) ||
-	    (mem_cgroup_below_low(memcg) && !sc->memcg_low_reclaim))
+	if (mem_cgroup_below_min(sc->target_mem_cgroup, memcg) ||
+	    (mem_cgroup_below_low(sc->target_mem_cgroup, memcg) &&
+	     !sc->memcg_low_reclaim))
 		return 0;
 
 	*need_aging = should_run_aging(lruvec, max_seq, min_seq, sc, can_swap, &nr_to_scan);
@@ -6096,13 +6097,13 @@ static void shrink_node_memcgs(pg_data_t *pgdat, struct scan_control *sc)
 
 		mem_cgroup_calculate_protection(target_memcg, memcg);
 
-		if (mem_cgroup_below_min(memcg)) {
+		if (mem_cgroup_below_min(target_memcg, memcg)) {
 			/*
 			 * Hard protection.
 			 * If there is no reclaimable memory, OOM.
 			 */
 			continue;
-		} else if (mem_cgroup_below_low(memcg)) {
+		} else if (mem_cgroup_below_low(target_memcg, memcg)) {
 			/*
 			 * Soft protection.
 			 * Respect the protection only as long as