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>
parent
09576073
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