Yafang Shao writes:
Look at this patch[1] carefully you will find that it introduces the same issue that I tried to fix in another patch [2]. Even more sad is these two patches are in the same patchset. Although this issue isn't related with the issue found by Naresh, we have to ask ourselves why we always make the same mistake ? One possible answer is that we always forget the lifecyle of memory.emin before we read it. memory.emin doesn't have the same lifecycle with the memcg, while it really has the same lifecyle with the reclaimer. IOW, once a reclaimer begins the protetion value should be set to 0, and after we traversal the memcg tree we calculate a protection value for this reclaimer, finnaly it disapears after the reclaimer stops. That is why I highly suggest to add an new protection member in scan_control before.
I agree with you that the e{min,low} lifecycle is confusing for everyone -- the only thing I've not seen confirmation of is any confirmed correlation with the i386 oom killer issue. If you've validated that, I'd like to see the data :-)