The percpu_counter is used for scenarios where performance is more important than the accuracy. For percpu_counter users, who want more accurate information in their slowpath, percpu_counter_sum is provided which traverses all the online CPUs to accumulate the data. The reason it only needs to traverse online CPUs is because percpu_counter does implement CPU offline callback which syncs the local data of the offlined CPU. However there is a small race window between the online CPUs traversal of percpu_counter_sum and the CPU offline callback. The offline callback has to traverse all the percpu_counters on the system to flush the CPU local data which can be a lot. During that time, the CPU which is going offline has already been published as offline to all the readers. So, as the offline callback is running, percpu_counter_sum can be called for one counter which has some state on the CPU going offline. Since percpu_counter_sum only traverses online CPUs, it will skip that specific CPU and the offline callback might not have flushed the state for that specific percpu_counter on that offlined CPU. Normally this is not an issue because percpu_counter users can deal with some inaccuracy for small time window. However a new user i.e. mm_struct on the cleanup path wants to check the exact state of the percpu_counter through check_mm(). For such users, this patch introduces percpu_counter_sum_all() which traverses all possible CPUs and it is used in fork.c:check_mm() to avoid the potential race. This issue is exposed by the later patch "mm: convert mm's rss stats into percpu_counter".
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| @@ -755,6 +755,11 @@ static void check_mm(struct mm_struct *mm) · 754 unmodified lines | |||
| 755 | for (i = 0; i < NR_MM_COUNTERS; i++) { | 755 | for (i = 0; i < NR_MM_COUNTERS; i++) { |
| 756 | long x = percpu_counter_sum(&mm->rss_stat[i]); | 756 | long x = percpu_counter_sum(&mm->rss_stat[i]); |
| 757 | 757 | ||
| 758 | if (likely(!x)) | ||
| 759 | continue; | ||
| 760 | |||
| 761 | /* Making sure this is not due to race with CPU offlining. */ | ||
| 762 | x = percpu_counter_sum_all(&mm->rss_stat[i]); | ||
| 758 | if (unlikely(x)) | 763 | if (unlikely(x)) |
| 759 | pr_alert("BUG: Bad rss-counter state mm:%p type:%s val:%ld\n", | 764 | pr_alert("BUG: Bad rss-counter state mm:%p type:%s val:%ld\n", |
| 760 | mm, resident_page_types[i], x); | 765 | mm, resident_page_types[i], x); |