[BUG] Read-Only THP causes stalls (commit 10359213d)

[christoffer.dall@linaro.org (Christoffer Dall)]

Hi Steve,

On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 03:24:20PM +0100, Steve Capper wrote:
> >> On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 09:34:04PM +0200, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> >> > Hi all,
> >> >
> >> > I noticed a regression on my arm64 APM X-Gene system a couple
> >> > of weeks back.  I would occassionally see the system lock up and see RCU
> >> > stalls during the caching phase of kernbench.  I then wrote a small
> >> > script that does nothing but cache the files
> >> > (http://paste.ubuntu.com/11324767/) and ran that in a loop.  On a known
> >> > bad commit (v4.1-rc2), out of 25 boots, I never saw it get past 21
> >> > iterations of the loop.  I have since tried to run a bisect from v3.19 to
> >> > v4.0 using 100 iterations as my criteria for a good commit.
> >> >
> >> > This resulted in the following first bad commit:
> >> >
> >> > 10359213d05acf804558bda7cc9b8422a828d1cd
> >> > (mm: incorporate read-only pages into transparent huge pages, 2015-02-11)
> >> >
> >> > Indeed, running the workload on v4.1-rc4 still produced the behavior,
> >> > but reverting the above commit gets me through 100 iterations of the
> >> > loop.
> >> >
> >> > I have not tried to reproduce on an x86 system.  Turning on a bunch
> >> > of kernel debugging features *seems* to hide the problem.  My config for
> >> > the XGene system is defconfig + CONFIG_BRIDGE and
> >> > CONFIG_POWER_RESET_XGENE.
> >> >
> >> > Please let me know if I can help test patches or other things I can
> >> > do to help.  I'm afraid that by simply reading the patch I didn't see
> >> > anything obviously wrong with it which would cause this behavior.
> >>
> >> As further confirmation, could you try:
> >>
> >> echo 0 > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_to_scan
> >
> > this returns -EINVAL.
> >
> > But I'm trying now with:
> >
> > echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
> >
> >>
> >> and verify the problem goes away without having to revert the patch?
> >
> > will let you know, so far so good...
> >
> >>
> >> Accordingly you should reproduce much eaiser this way (setting
> >> $largevalue to 8192 or something, it doesn't matter).
> >>
> >> echo $largevalue > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_to_scan
> >> echo 0 > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/alloc_sleep_millisecs
> >> echo 0 > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/scan_sleep_millisecs
> >>
> >> Then push the system into swap with some memhog -r1000 xG.
> >
> > what is memhog?  I couldn't find the utility in Google...
> >
> > I did try with the above settings and just push a bunch of data into
> > ramfs and tmpfs and indeed the sytem died very quickly (on v4.0-rc4).
> >
> >>
> >> The patch just allows readonly anon pages to be collapsed along with
> >> read-write ones, the vma permissions allows it, so they have to be
> >> swapcache pages, this is why swap shall be required.
> >>
> >> Perhaps there's some arch detail that needs fixing but it'll be easier
> >> to track it down once you have a way to reproduce fast.
> >>
> > Yes, would be great to be able to reproduce quickly.
> >

> I'm trying to reproduce this on hardware here; but have been unable to
> thus far with 4.1-rc2 on a Xgene and Seattle systems.

Really?  That's concerning.  I think Andre mentioned he could
reproduce...

How many iterations have you run the caching loop for?

Are you using defconfig?  I noticed that turning on debugging features
was hiding the problem.

> Also, I tried the memhog + pages_to_scan suggestion from Andrea.

Any chance you could send me the memhog tool?

> 
> Maybe a silly question, where is your root filesystem located? Is
> there anything network mounted?
> 
It's a regular ext4 on the local SATA disk.  Ubuntu Trusty.

Thanks,
-Christoffer