Re: [patch] mm: clear pages_scanned only if draining a pcp adds pages to the buddy allocator

[Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 02:58:39PM -0800, David Rientjes wrote:
> 0e093d99763e (writeback: do not sleep on the congestion queue if there
> are no congested BDIs or if significant congestion is not being
> encountered in the current zone) uncovered a livelock in the page
> allocator that resulted in tasks infinitely looping trying to find memory
> and kswapd running at 100% cpu.
> 
> The issue occurs because drain_all_pages() is called immediately
> following direct reclaim when no memory is freed and try_to_free_pages()
> returns non-zero because all zones in the zonelist do not have their
> all_unreclaimable flag set.
> 
> When draining the per-cpu pagesets back to the buddy allocator for each
> zone, the zone->pages_scanned counter is cleared to avoid erroneously
> setting zone->all_unreclaimable later.  The problem is that no pages may
> actually be drained and, thus, the unreclaimable logic never fails direct
> reclaim so the oom killer may be invoked.
> 
> This apparently only manifested after wait_iff_congested() was introduced
> and the zone was full of anonymous memory that would not congest the
> backing store.  The page allocator would infinitely loop if there were no
> other tasks waiting to be scheduled and clear zone->pages_scanned because
> of drain_all_pages() as the result of this change before kswapd could
> scan enough pages to trigger the reclaim logic.  Additionally, with every
> loop of the page allocator and in the reclaim path, kswapd would be
> kicked and would end up running at 100% cpu.  In this scenario, current
> and kswapd are all running continuously with kswapd incrementing
> zone->pages_scanned and current clearing it.
> 
> The problem is even more pronounced when current swaps some of its memory
> to swap cache and the reclaimable logic then considers all active
> anonymous memory in the all_unreclaimable logic, which requires a much
> higher zone->pages_scanned value for try_to_free_pages() to return zero
> that is never attainable in this scenario.
> 
> Before wait_iff_congested(), the page allocator would incur an
> unconditional timeout and allow kswapd to elevate zone->pages_scanned to
> a level that the oom killer would be called the next time it loops.
> 
> The fix is to only attempt to drain pcp pages if there is actually a
> quantity to be drained.  The unconditional clearing of
> zone->pages_scanned in free_pcppages_bulk() need not be changed since
> other callers already ensure that draining will occur.  This patch
> ensures that free_pcppages_bulk() will actually free memory before
> calling into it from drain_all_pages() so zone->pages_scanned is only
> cleared if appropriate.
> 
> Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>

Reviewed-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>

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