Setting the original memory.limit_in_bytes hardlimit is subject to a
race condition when the desired value is below the current usage.  The
code tries a few times to first reclaim and then see if the usage has
dropped to where we would like it to be, but there is no locking, and
the workload is free to continue making new charges up to the old limit.
Thus, attempting to shrink a workload relies on pure luck and hope that
the workload happens to cooperate.

To fix this in the cgroup2 memory.max knob, do it the other way round:
set the limit first, then try enforcement.  And if reclaim is not able
to succeed, trigger OOM kills in the group.  Keep going until the new
limit is met, we run out of OOM victims and there's only unreclaimable
memory left, or the task writing to memory.max is killed.  This allows
users to shrink groups reliably, and the behavior is consistent with
what happens when new charges are attempted in excess of memory.max.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov@virtuozzo.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>