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Commit acf92b48 authored by Dave Chinner's avatar Dave Chinner Committed by Al Viro
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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: default avatarDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAl Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
parent 09576073
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