mempolicy: rework mempolicy Reference Counting [yet again]

After further discussion with Christoph Lameter, it has become clear that my
earlier attempts to clean up the mempolicy reference counting were a bit of
overkill in some areas, resulting in superflous ref/unref in what are usually
fast paths.  In other areas, further inspection reveals that I botched the
unref for interleave policies.

A separate patch, suitable for upstream/stable trees, fixes up the known
errors in the previous attempt to fix reference counting.

This patch reworks the memory policy referencing counting and, one hopes,
simplifies the code.  Maybe I'll get it right this time.

See the update to the numa_memory_policy.txt document for a discussion of
memory policy reference counting that motivates this patch.

Summary:

Lookup of mempolicy, based on (vma, address) need only add a reference for
shared policy, and we need only unref the policy when finished for shared
policies.  So, this patch backs out all of the unneeded extra reference
counting added by my previous attempt.  It then unrefs only shared policies
when we're finished with them, using the mpol_cond_put() [conditional put]
helper function introduced by this patch.

Note that shmem_swapin() calls read_swap_cache_async() with a dummy vma
containing just the policy.  read_swap_cache_async() can call alloc_page_vma()
multiple times, so we can't let alloc_page_vma() unref the shared policy in
this case.  To avoid this, we make a copy of any non-null shared policy and
remove the MPOL_F_SHARED flag from the copy.  This copy occurs before reading
a page [or multiple pages] from swap, so the overhead should not be an issue
here.

I introduced a new static inline function "mpol_cond_copy()" to copy the
shared policy to an on-stack policy and remove the flags that would require a
conditional free.  The current implementation of mpol_cond_copy() assumes that
the struct mempolicy contains no pointers to dynamically allocated structures
that must be duplicated or reference counted during copy.

Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 68 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt b/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt
index 27b9507a3769..6719d642653f 100644
--- a/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt
+++ b/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt
@@ -311,6 +311,74 @@ Components of Memory Policies
             MPOL_PREFERRED policies that were created with an empty nodemask
             (local allocation).
 
+MEMORY POLICY REFERENCE COUNTING
+
+To resolve use/free races, struct mempolicy contains an atomic reference
+count field.  Internal interfaces, mpol_get()/mpol_put() increment and
+decrement this reference count, respectively.  mpol_put() will only free
+the structure back to the mempolicy kmem cache when the reference count
+goes to zero.
+
+When a new memory policy is allocated, it's reference count is initialized
+to '1', representing the reference held by the task that is installing the
+new policy.  When a pointer to a memory policy structure is stored in another
+structure, another reference is added, as the task's reference will be dropped
+on completion of the policy installation.
+
+During run-time "usage" of the policy, we attempt to minimize atomic operations
+on the reference count, as this can lead to cache lines bouncing between cpus
+and NUMA nodes.  "Usage" here means one of the following:
+
+1) querying of the policy, either by the task itself [using the get_mempolicy()
+   API discussed below] or by another task using the /proc/<pid>/numa_maps
+   interface.
+
+2) examination of the policy to determine the policy mode and associated node
+   or node lists, if any, for page allocation.  This is considered a "hot
+   path".  Note that for MPOL_BIND, the "usage" extends across the entire
+   allocation process, which may sleep during page reclaimation, because the
+   BIND policy nodemask is used, by reference, to filter ineligible nodes.
+
+We can avoid taking an extra reference during the usages listed above as
+follows:
+
+1) we never need to get/free the system default policy as this is never
+   changed nor freed, once the system is up and running.
+
+2) for querying the policy, we do not need to take an extra reference on the
+   target task's task policy nor vma policies because we always acquire the
+   task's mm's mmap_sem for read during the query.  The set_mempolicy() and
+   mbind() APIs [see below] always acquire the mmap_sem for write when
+   installing or replacing task or vma policies.  Thus, there is no possibility
+   of a task or thread freeing a policy while another task or thread is
+   querying it.
+
+3) Page allocation usage of task or vma policy occurs in the fault path where
+   we hold them mmap_sem for read.  Again, because replacing the task or vma
+   policy requires that the mmap_sem be held for write, the policy can't be
+   freed out from under us while we're using it for page allocation.
+
+4) Shared policies require special consideration.  One task can replace a
+   shared memory policy while another task, with a distinct mmap_sem, is
+   querying or allocating a page based on the policy.  To resolve this
+   potential race, the shared policy infrastructure adds an extra reference
+   to the shared policy during lookup while holding a spin lock on the shared
+   policy management structure.  This requires that we drop this extra
+   reference when we're finished "using" the policy.  We must drop the
+   extra reference on shared policies in the same query/allocation paths
+   used for non-shared policies.  For this reason, shared policies are marked
+   as such, and the extra reference is dropped "conditionally"--i.e., only
+   for shared policies.
+
+   Because of this extra reference counting, and because we must lookup
+   shared policies in a tree structure under spinlock, shared policies are
+   more expensive to use in the page allocation path.  This is expecially
+   true for shared policies on shared memory regions shared by tasks running
+   on different NUMA nodes.  This extra overhead can be avoided by always
+   falling back to task or system default policy for shared memory regions,
+   or by prefaulting the entire shared memory region into memory and locking
+   it down.  However, this might not be appropriate for all applications.
+
 MEMORY POLICY APIs
 
 Linux supports 3 system calls for controlling memory policy.  These APIS