Re: [PATCH 3/3] mm: memcg: use non-unified stats flushing for userspace reads

[Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>]

On 8/28/23 13:28, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 10:27 AM Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 8/28/23 13:07, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
>>>> Here I agree with you. Let's go with the approach which is easy to
>>>> undo for now. Though I prefer the new explicit interface for flushing,
>>>> that step would be very hard to undo. Let's reevaluate if the proposed
>>>> approach shows negative impact on production traffic and I think
>>>> Cloudflare folks can give us the results soon.
>>> Do you prefer we also switch to using a mutex (with preemption
>>> disabled) to avoid the scenario Michal described where flushers give
>>> up the lock and sleep resulting in an unbounded wait time in the worst
>>> case?
>> Locking with mutex with preemption disabled is an oxymoron. Use spinlock
>> if you want to have preemption disabled. The purpose of usiing mutex is
>> to allow the lock owner to sleep, but you can't sleep with preemption
>> disabled. You need to enable preemption first. You can disable
>> preemption for a short time in a non-sleeping section of the lock
>> critical section, but I would not recommend disabling preemption for the
>> whole critical section.
> I thought using a mutex with preemption disabled would at least allow
> waiters to sleep rather than spin, is this not correct (or doesn't
> matter) ?

Because of optimistic spinning, a mutex lock waiter will only sleep if 
the lock holder sleep or when its time slice run out. So the waiters are 
likely to spin for quite a while before they go to sleep.

Cheers,
Longman