memcg: move LRU size accounting on reparenting instead of copying it

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: memcg: move LRU size accounting on reparenting instead of copying it When a memory cgroup is offlined its LRU folios are reparented to the parent. lruvec_reparent_lru() splices the child's lists into the parent's and credits the parent with the child's per-zone lru_zone_size[], but never clears the child's copy, so the size is copied rather than moved. lru_gen_reparent_memcg() does the same for MGLRU. The parent is left correct, credited with exactly the folios it took over. The stale value sits on the child and nothing will correct it: folio->memcg_data now resolves to the parent, so every later update_lru_size() for those folios goes there. Dying cgroups are not freed immediately and mem_cgroup_iter() still walks them, so shrink_lruvec() keeps being called on them. get_scan_count() reads the phantom counter through lruvec_lru_size() and the scan loop then grinds through nr[] in SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX steps against an empty list, for as long as the dead cgroup lives. Under MGLRU the MGLRU scanner runs instead, but count_shadow_nodes() sums all of NR_LRU_LISTS through lruvec_lru_size() and over-budgets the shadow node limit just the same. On one 251 GiB host a sweep of every mz->lru_zone_size[] found 380 counters describing folios on no list at all: 124777314 pages, 476 GiB, 1.89x the machine's RAM, across 57 cgroups. All were on memcgs with CSS_DYING set and CSS_ONLINE clear, and parent/child pairs reported byte-identical sizes. LRU_UNEVICTABLE needs its size moved too. Its list is deliberately not spliced because lruvec_init() poisons the head - the unevictable LRU is imaginary and folios are never threaded on it - but the size is kept by lruvec_add_folio()/lruvec_del_folio() and those folios account to the parent from here on. This depends on commit bf4ade7dbd76 ("memcg: keep folio's objcg same as its node") and must not be backported ahead of it. Without that invariant a folio's objcg can belong to another node, so a folio already spliced onto the parent's list can still resolve to the child's lruvec until the objcg's node is reparented in a later iteration of memcg_reparent_objcgs(); clearing the child's counter early then lets lruvec_del_folio() underflow it and trip the WARN_ONCE()/VM_BUG_ON() in mem_cgroup_update_lru_size().

Source published

17 Sep 2026 16:12:19 UTC

Source modified

19 Oct 2026 09:07:09 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

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