A memcg is considered low limited even when the current usage is equal to
the low limit. This leads to interesting side effects e.g.
groups/hierarchies with no memory accounted are considered protected and
so the reclaim will emit MEMCG_LOW event when encountering them.
Another and much bigger issue was reported by Joonsoo Kim. He has hit a
NULL ptr dereference with the legacy cgroup API which even doesn't have
low limit exposed. The limit is 0 by default but the initial check fails
for memcg with 0 consumption and parent_mem_cgroup() would return NULL if
use_hierarchy is 0 and so page_counter_read would try to dereference NULL.
I suppose that the current implementation is just an overlook because the
documentation in Documentation/cgroups/unified-hierarchy.txt says:
"The memory.low boundary on the other hand is a top-down allocated
reserve. A cgroup enjoys reclaim protection when it and all its
ancestors are below their low boundaries"
Fix the usage and the low limit comparision in mem_cgroup_low accordingly.
Fixes: 241994ed8649 (mm: memcontrol: default hierarchy interface for memory)
Reported-by: Joonsoo Kim <js1304@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
4e54dede38