kernel.git/mm/vmscan.c, branch linux-3.6.y

mm: vmscan: fix endless loop in kswapd balancing

2012-12-10T19:13:10Z

commit 60cefed485a02bd99b6299dad70666fe49245da7 upstream. Kswapd does not in all places have the same criteria for a balanced zone. Zones are only being reclaimed when their high watermark is breached, but compaction checks loop over the zonelist again when the zone does not meet the low watermark plus two times the size of the allocation. This gets kswapd stuck in an endless loop over a small zone, like the DMA zone, where the high watermark is smaller than the compaction requirement. Add a function, zone_balanced(), that checks the watermark, and, for higher order allocations, if compaction has enough free memory. Then use it uniformly to check for balanced zones. This makes sure that when the compaction watermark is not met, at least reclaim happens and progress is made - or the zone is declared unreclaimable at some point and skipped entirely. Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Reported-by: George Spelvin Reported-by: Johannes Hirte Reported-by: Tomas Racek Tested-by: Johannes Hirte Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel Cc: Mel Gorman Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

mm: vmscan: check for fatal signals iff the process was throttled

2012-12-03T19:38:14Z

commit 50694c28f1e1dbea18272980d265742a5027fb63 upstream. Commit 5515061d22f0 ("mm: throttle direct reclaimers if PF_MEMALLOC reserves are low and swap is backed by network storage") introduced a check for fatal signals after a process gets throttled for network storage. The intention was that if a process was throttled and got killed that it should not trigger the OOM killer. As pointed out by Minchan Kim and David Rientjes, this check is in the wrong place and too broad. If a system is in am OOM situation and a process is exiting, it can loop in __alloc_pages_slowpath() and calling direct reclaim in a loop. As the fatal signal is pending it returns 1 as if it is making forward progress and can effectively deadlock. This patch moves the fatal_signal_pending() check after throttling to throttle_direct_reclaim() where it belongs. If the process is killed while throttled, it will return immediately without direct reclaim except now it will have TIF_MEMDIE set and will use the PFMEMALLOC reserves. Minchan pointed out that it may be better to direct reclaim before returning to avoid using the reserves because there may be pages that can easily reclaim that would avoid using the reserves. However, we do no such targetted reclaim and there is no guarantee that suitable pages are available. As it is expected that this throttling happens when swap-over-NFS is used there is a possibility that the process will instead swap which may allocate network buffers from the PFMEMALLOC reserves. Hence, in the swap-over-nfs case where a process can be throtted and be killed it can use the reserves to exit or it can potentially use reserves to swap a few pages and then exit. This patch takes the option of using the reserves if necessary to allow the process exit quickly. If this patch passes review it should be considered a -stable candidate for 3.6. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Cc: David Rientjes Cc: Luigi Semenzato Cc: Dan Magenheimer Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro Cc: Sonny Rao Cc: Minchan Kim Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Signed-off-by: CAI Qian Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

mm: bugfix: set current->reclaim_state to NULL while returning from kswapd()

2012-11-26T20:14:04Z

commit b0a8cc58e6b9aaae3045752059e5e6260c0b94bc upstream. In kswapd(), set current->reclaim_state to NULL before returning, as current->reclaim_state holds reference to variable on kswapd()'s stack. In rare cases, while returning from kswapd() during memory offlining, __free_slab() and freepages() can access the dangling pointer of current->reclaim_state. Signed-off-by: Takamori Yamaguchi Signed-off-by: Aaditya Kumar Acked-by: David Rientjes Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

memory hotplug: reset pgdat->kswapd to NULL if creating kernel thread fails

2012-09-17T22:00:37Z

If kthread_run() fails, pgdat->kswapd contains errno. When we stop this thread, we only check whether pgdat->kswapd is NULL and access it. If it contains errno, it will cause page fault. Reset pgdat->kswapd to NULL when creating kernel thread fails can avoid this problem. Signed-off-by: Wen Congyang Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

memcg: gix memory accounting scalability in shrink_page_list

2012-08-01T01:42:49Z

I noticed in a multi-process parallel files reading benchmark I ran on a 8 socket machine, throughput slowed down by a factor of 8 when I ran the benchmark within a cgroup container. I traced the problem to the following code path (see below) when we are trying to reclaim memory from file cache. The res_counter_uncharge function is called on every page that's reclaimed and created heavy lock contention. The patch below allows the reclaimed pages to be uncharged from the resource counter in batch and recovered the regression. Tim 40.67% usemem [kernel.kallsyms] [k] _raw_spin_lock | --- _raw_spin_lock | |--92.61%-- res_counter_uncharge | | | |--100.00%-- __mem_cgroup_uncharge_common | | | | | |--100.00%-- mem_cgroup_uncharge_cache_page | | | __remove_mapping | | | shrink_page_list | | | shrink_inactive_list | | | shrink_mem_cgroup_zone | | | shrink_zone | | | do_try_to_free_pages | | | try_to_free_pages | | | __alloc_pages_nodemask | | | alloc_pages_current Signed-off-by: Tim Chen Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Acked-by: Johannes Weiner Acked-by: Kirill A. Shutemov Cc: Michal Hocko Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

memcg: further prevent OOM with too many dirty pages

2012-08-01T01:42:49Z

The may_enter_fs test turns out to be too restrictive: though I saw no problem with it when testing on 3.5-rc6, it very soon OOMed when I tested on 3.5-rc6-mm1. I don't know what the difference there is, perhaps I just slightly changed the way I started off the testing: dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/temp bs=1M count=1024; rm -f /mnt/temp; sync repeatedly, in 20M memory.limit_in_bytes cgroup to ext4 on USB stick. ext4 (and gfs2 and xfs) turn out to allocate new pages for writing with AOP_FLAG_NOFS: that seems a little worrying, and it's unclear to me why the transaction needs to be started even before allocating pagecache memory. But it may not be worth worrying about these days: if direct reclaim avoids FS writeback, does __GFP_FS now mean anything? Anyway, we insisted on the may_enter_fs test to avoid hangs with the loop device; but since that also masks off __GFP_IO, we can test for __GFP_IO directly, ignoring may_enter_fs and __GFP_FS. But even so, the test still OOMs sometimes: when originally testing on 3.5-rc6, it OOMed about one time in five or ten; when testing just now on 3.5-rc6-mm1, it OOMed on the first iteration. This residual problem comes from an accumulation of pages under ordinary writeback, not marked PageReclaim, so rightly not causing the memcg check to wait on their writeback: these too can prevent shrink_page_list() from freeing any pages, so many times that memcg reclaim fails and OOMs. Deal with these in the same way as direct reclaim now deals with dirty FS pages: mark them PageReclaim. It is appropriate to rotate these to tail of list when writepage completes, but more importantly, the PageReclaim flag makes memcg reclaim wait on them if encountered again. Increment NR_VMSCAN_IMMEDIATE? That's arguable: I chose not. Setting PageReclaim here may occasionally race with end_page_writeback() clearing it: lru_deactivate_fn() already faced the same race, and correctly concluded that the window is small and the issue non-critical. With these changes, the test runs indefinitely without OOMing on ext4, ext3 and ext2: I'll move on to test with other filesystems later. Trivia: invert conditions for a clearer block without an else, and goto keep_locked to do the unlock_page. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Minchan Kim Cc: Rik van Riel Cc: Ying Han Cc: Greg Thelen Cc: Hugh Dickins Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Johannes Weiner Cc: Fengguang Wu Acked-by: Michal Hocko Cc: Dave Chinner Cc: Theodore Ts'o Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

memcg: prevent OOM with too many dirty pages

2012-08-01T01:42:49Z

The current implementation of dirty pages throttling is not memcg aware which makes it easy to have memcg LRUs full of dirty pages. Without throttling, these LRUs can be scanned faster than the rate of writeback, leading to memcg OOM conditions when the hard limit is small. This patch fixes the problem by throttling the allocating process (possibly a writer) during the hard limit reclaim by waiting on PageReclaim pages. We are waiting only for PageReclaim pages because those are the pages that made one full round over LRU and that means that the writeback is much slower than scanning. The solution is far from being ideal - long term solution is memcg aware dirty throttling - but it is meant to be a band aid until we have a real fix. We are seeing this happening during nightly backups which are placed into containers to prevent from eviction of the real working set. The change affects only memcg reclaim and only when we encounter PageReclaim pages which is a signal that the reclaim doesn't catch up on with the writers so somebody should be throttled. This could be potentially unfair because it could be somebody else from the group who gets throttled on behalf of the writer but as writers need to allocate as well and they allocate in higher rate the probability that only innocent processes would be penalized is not that high. I have tested this change by a simple dd copying /dev/zero to tmpfs or ext3 running under small memcg (1G copy under 5M, 60M, 300M and 2G containers) and dd got killed by OOM killer every time. With the patch I could run the dd with the same size under 5M controller without any OOM. The issue is more visible with slower devices for output. * With the patch ================ * tmpfs size=2G --------------- $ vim cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 5M using Limit 5M for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 30.4049 s, 34.5 MB/s $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 60M using Limit 60M for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 31.4561 s, 33.3 MB/s $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 300M using Limit 300M for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 20.4618 s, 51.2 MB/s $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 2G using Limit 2G for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1.42172 s, 738 MB/s * ext3 ------ $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 5M using Limit 5M for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 27.9547 s, 37.5 MB/s $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 60M using Limit 60M for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 30.3221 s, 34.6 MB/s $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 300M using Limit 300M for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 24.5764 s, 42.7 MB/s $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 2G using Limit 2G for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 3.35828 s, 312 MB/s * Without the patch =================== * tmpfs size=2G --------------- $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 5M using Limit 5M for group ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh: line 46: 4668 Killed dd if=/dev/zero of=$OUT/zero bs=1M count=$count $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 60M using Limit 60M for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 25.4989 s, 41.1 MB/s $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 300M using Limit 300M for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 24.3928 s, 43.0 MB/s $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 2G using Limit 2G for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1.49797 s, 700 MB/s * ext3 ------ $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 5M using Limit 5M for group ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh: line 46: 4689 Killed dd if=/dev/zero of=$OUT/zero bs=1M count=$count $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 60M using Limit 60M for group ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh: line 46: 4692 Killed dd if=/dev/zero of=$OUT/zero bs=1M count=$count $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 300M using Limit 300M for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 20.248 s, 51.8 MB/s $ ./cgroup_cache_oom_test.sh 2G using Limit 2G for group 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 2.85201 s, 368 MB/s [akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak changelog, reordered the test to optimize for CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR=n] [hughd@google.com: fix deadlock with loop driver] Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Minchan Kim Cc: Rik van Riel Cc: Ying Han Cc: Greg Thelen Cc: Hugh Dickins Reviewed-by: Mel Gorman Acked-by: Johannes Weiner Reviewed-by: Fengguang Wu Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: account for the number of times direct reclaimers get throttled

2012-08-01T01:42:46Z

Under significant pressure when writing back to network-backed storage, direct reclaimers may get throttled. This is expected to be a short-lived event and the processes get woken up again but processes do get stalled. This patch counts how many times such stalling occurs. It's up to the administrator whether to reduce these stalls by increasing min_free_kbytes. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Cc: David Miller Cc: Neil Brown Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Mike Christie Cc: Eric B Munson Cc: Eric Dumazet Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: throttle direct reclaimers if PF_MEMALLOC reserves are low and swap is backed by network storage

2012-08-01T01:42:46Z

If swap is backed by network storage such as NBD, there is a risk that a large number of reclaimers can hang the system by consuming all PF_MEMALLOC reserves. To avoid these hangs, the administrator must tune min_free_kbytes in advance which is a bit fragile. This patch throttles direct reclaimers if half the PF_MEMALLOC reserves are in use. If the system is routinely getting throttled the system administrator can increase min_free_kbytes so degradation is smoother but the system will keep running. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Cc: David Miller Cc: Neil Brown Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Mike Christie Cc: Eric B Munson Cc: Eric Dumazet Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

memcg: rename config variables

2012-08-01T01:42:43Z

Sanity: CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR -> CONFIG_MEMCG CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP -> CONFIG_MEMCG_SWAP CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP_ENABLED -> CONFIG_MEMCG_SWAP_ENABLED CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_KMEM -> CONFIG_MEMCG_KMEM [mhocko@suse.cz: fix missed bits] Cc: Glauber Costa Acked-by: Michal Hocko Cc: Johannes Weiner Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Hugh Dickins Cc: Tejun Heo Cc: Aneesh Kumar K.V Cc: David Rientjes Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds