Re: swapping to death by stressing mlock

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 01:21:49PM -0700, Rusty Lynch wrote:
> While getting more familiar with the vm subsystem I discovered that it is
> fairly easy to lockup my system by mlocking enough memory. I believe what 
> is happening is that I am reducing the amount of swappable physical ram
> to the point that try_to_free_pages() will go into an endless loop waiting
> for bdflush to free up some pages.
> I'm guessing this is not a valid condition for a properly configured server,
> but since I'm not feeling very confident about my above explanation, I'm not
> so sure this isn't something to look into.
> On my 2.6.0-test5 kernel I run a little utility that attempts to allocate 
> a large enough chunk of memory, touch all pages in the buffer, and then 
> mlock the buffer.  Just setting vm.overcommit_memory=2 and a real low
> vm.overcommit_ratio doesn't help a lot since all I have to do is squeeze out
> the available physical ram that can be swapped out.
> This is what I see for my offending process if I meta-sysrq-t.

(a) mlock_fixup() ignores the return value of make_pages_present();
	it might be a good idea to hand back -ENOMEM if it fail
(b) get_user_pages() (and hence make_pages_present() etc.) should fail
	when bad things would otherwise happen.
(c) apart from these two observations, the best I can tell is that
	you're thrashing

So, you've seen that wakeup_bdflush() is done repeatedly; is there any
indication such as, say, the address in get_user_pages() to tell you
whether you're making forward progress? Just the fact that's repeatedly
called isn't really enough to make the distinction between livelock and
just being slow.


-- wli
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