mem_cgroup_move_charge() invokes lru_add_drain_all() so that the pvec pages can be moved too. lru_add_drain_all() schedules and flushes work items on system_wq which depends on being able to create new kworkers to make forward progress. Since 1ed1328792ff ("sched, cgroup: replace signal_struct->group_rwsem with a global percpu_rwsem"), a new task can't be created while in the cgroup migration path and the described lru_add_drain_all() invocation can easily lead to a deadlock. Charge moving is best-effort and whether the pvec pages are migrated or not doesn't really matter. Don't call it during charge moving. Eventually, we want to move the actual charge moving outside the migration path. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx> Reported-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> Suggested-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx> Fixes: 1ed1328792ff ("sched, cgroup: replace signal_struct->group_rwsem with a global percpu_rwsem") Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --- Hello, So, this deadlock seems pretty easy to trigger. We'll make the charge moving asynchronous eventually but let's not hold off fixing an immediate problem. Thanks. mm/memcontrol.c | 1 - 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c index 36db05f..56060c7 100644 --- a/mm/memcontrol.c +++ b/mm/memcontrol.c @@ -4859,7 +4859,6 @@ static void mem_cgroup_move_charge(struct mm_struct *mm) .mm = mm, }; - lru_add_drain_all(); /* * Signal lock_page_memcg() to take the memcg's move_lock * while we're moving its pages to another memcg. Then wait -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe cgroups" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html