memcg: add comments clarifying aspects of cache attribute propagation
This patch clarifies two aspects of cache attribute propagation.
First, the expected context for the for_each_memcg_cache macro in
memcontrol.h. The usages already in the codebase are safe. In mm/slub.c,
it is trivially safe because the lock is acquired right before the loop.
In mm/slab.c, it is less so: the lock is acquired by an outer function a
few steps back in the stack, so a VM_BUG_ON() is added to make sure it is
indeed safe.
A comment is also added to detail why we are returning the value of the
parent cache and ignoring the children's when we propagate the attributes.
Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <glommer@parallels.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Kamezawa Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
diff --git a/mm/slub.c b/mm/slub.c
index 21c94d9..efe2cff 100644
--- a/mm/slub.c
+++ b/mm/slub.c
@@ -5108,12 +5108,25 @@
if (s->max_attr_size < len)
s->max_attr_size = len;
+ /*
+ * This is a best effort propagation, so this function's return
+ * value will be determined by the parent cache only. This is
+ * basically because not all attributes will have a well
+ * defined semantics for rollbacks - most of the actions will
+ * have permanent effects.
+ *
+ * Returning the error value of any of the children that fail
+ * is not 100 % defined, in the sense that users seeing the
+ * error code won't be able to know anything about the state of
+ * the cache.
+ *
+ * Only returning the error code for the parent cache at least
+ * has well defined semantics. The cache being written to
+ * directly either failed or succeeded, in which case we loop
+ * through the descendants with best-effort propagation.
+ */
for_each_memcg_cache_index(i) {
struct kmem_cache *c = cache_from_memcg(s, i);
- /*
- * This function's return value is determined by the
- * parent cache only
- */
if (c)
attribute->store(c, buf, len);
}