GitLab

The memcg uncharging code that is involved towards the end of a page's
lifetime - truncation, reclaim, swapout, migration - is impressively
complicated and fragile.

Because anonymous and file pages were always charged before they had their
page->mapping established, uncharges had to happen when the page type
could still be known from the context; as in unmap for anonymous, page
cache removal for file and shmem pages, and swap cache truncation for swap
pages.  However, these operations happen well before the page is actually
freed, and so a lot of synchronization is necessary:

- Charging, uncharging, page migration, and charge migration all need
  to take a per-page bit spinlock as they could race with uncharging.

- Swap cache truncation happens during both swap-in and swap-out, and
  possibly repeatedly before the page is actually freed.  This means
  that the memcg swapout code is called from many contexts that make
  no sense and it has to figure out the direction...