From: Hugh Dickins <hughd@xxxxxxxxxx> This patch has been added to the 3.12 stable tree. If you have any objections, please let us know. =============== commit ab3f5faa6255a0eb4f832675507d9e295ca7e9ba upstream. Sometimes the cleanup after memcg hierarchy testing gets stuck in mem_cgroup_reparent_charges(), unable to bring non-kmem usage down to 0. There may turn out to be several causes, but a major cause is this: the workitem to offline parent can get run before workitem to offline child; parent's mem_cgroup_reparent_charges() circles around waiting for the child's pages to be reparented to its lrus, but it's holding cgroup_mutex which prevents the child from reaching its mem_cgroup_reparent_charges(). Just use an ordered workqueue for cgroup_destroy_wq. tj: Committing as the temporary fix until the reverse dependency can be removed from memcg. Comment updated accordingly. Fixes: e5fca243abae ("cgroup: use a dedicated workqueue for cgroup destruction") Suggested-by: Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Jiri Slaby <jslaby@xxxxxxx> --- kernel/cgroup.c | 8 ++++++-- 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/kernel/cgroup.c b/kernel/cgroup.c index 5d9d542c0bb5..e89f6cec01c9 100644 --- a/kernel/cgroup.c +++ b/kernel/cgroup.c @@ -5168,12 +5168,16 @@ static int __init cgroup_wq_init(void) /* * There isn't much point in executing destruction path in * parallel. Good chunk is serialized with cgroup_mutex anyway. - * Use 1 for @max_active. + * + * XXX: Must be ordered to make sure parent is offlined after + * children. The ordering requirement is for memcg where a + * parent's offline may wait for a child's leading to deadlock. In + * the long term, this should be fixed from memcg side. * * We would prefer to do this in cgroup_init() above, but that * is called before init_workqueues(): so leave this until after. */ - cgroup_destroy_wq = alloc_workqueue("cgroup_destroy", 0, 1); + cgroup_destroy_wq = alloc_ordered_workqueue("cgroup_destroy", 0); BUG_ON(!cgroup_destroy_wq); return 0; } -- 2.12.2