From 6e543d5780e36ff5ee56c44d7e2e30db3457a7ed Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Lisa Du Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 14:22:36 -0700 Subject: mm: vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages() livelock This patch is based on KOSAKI's work and I add a little more description, please refer https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/14/74. Currently, I found system can enter a state that there are lots of free pages in a zone but only order-0 and order-1 pages which means the zone is heavily fragmented, then high order allocation could make direct reclaim path's long stall(ex, 60 seconds) especially in no swap and no compaciton enviroment. This problem happened on v3.4, but it seems issue still lives in current tree, the reason is do_try_to_free_pages enter live lock: kswapd will go to sleep if the zones have been fully scanned and are still not balanced. As kswapd thinks there's little point trying all over again to avoid infinite loop. Instead it changes order from high-order to 0-order because kswapd think order-0 is the most important. Look at 73ce02e9 in detail. If watermarks are ok, kswapd will go back to sleep and may leave zone->all_unreclaimable =3D 0. It assume high-order users can still perform direct reclaim if they wish. Direct reclaim continue to reclaim for a high order which is not a COSTLY_ORDER without oom-killer until kswapd turn on zone->all_unreclaimble= . This is because to avoid too early oom-kill. So it means direct_reclaim depends on kswapd to break this loop. In worst case, direct-reclaim may continue to page reclaim forever when kswapd sleeps forever until someone like watchdog detect and finally kill the process. As described in: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/103737 We can't turn on zone->all_unreclaimable from direct reclaim path because direct reclaim path don't take any lock and this way is racy. Thus this patch removes zone->all_unreclaimable field completely and recalculates zone reclaimable state every time. Note: we can't take the idea that direct-reclaim see zone->pages_scanned directly and kswapd continue to use zone->all_unreclaimable. Because, it is racy. commit 929bea7c71 (vmscan: all_unreclaimable() use zone->all_unreclaimable as a name) describes the detail. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: uninline zone_reclaimable_pages() and zone_reclaimable()] Cc: Aaditya Kumar Cc: Ying Han Cc: Nick Piggin Acked-by: Rik van Riel Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: Bob Liu Cc: Neil Zhang Cc: Russell King - ARM Linux Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko Acked-by: Minchan Kim Acked-by: Johannes Weiner Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro Signed-off-by: Lisa Du Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- mm/internal.h | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+) (limited to 'mm/internal.h') diff --git a/mm/internal.h b/mm/internal.h index 4390ac6c106e..684f7aa9692a 100644 --- a/mm/internal.h +++ b/mm/internal.h @@ -85,6 +85,8 @@ extern unsigned long highest_memmap_pfn; */ extern int isolate_lru_page(struct page *page); extern void putback_lru_page(struct page *page); +extern unsigned long zone_reclaimable_pages(struct zone *zone); +extern bool zone_reclaimable(struct zone *zone); /* * in mm/rmap.c: -- cgit v1.2.3-58-ga151