public inbox for linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Anders Ossowicki <aowi@novozymes.com>
To: xfs@oss.sgi.com
Subject: "XFS: possible memory allocation deadlock in kmem_alloc" on high memory machine
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2015 16:57:41 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20150601145741.GA16608@otto> (raw)

Hi,

We've started seeing a slew of these messages in dmesg:

XFS: possible memory allocation deadlock in kmem_alloc (mode:0x250)

First question: Is this cause for alarm at all? Should we expect the
disk to blow up in our faces? Should we expect loss of performance?

This is from a machine under heavy load (database server, large dataset,
lots of I/O). It seems to happen only when we hit 15k-20k+ iops on the
disk.

We're running on 3.18.13, built from kernel.org git.

The machine has 3TB of memory and after googling the message for a
while, I guess memory fragmentation could be a likely cause. Looking at
/proc/buddyinfo when these messages show up, we see that there are
almost no fragments of order 1 and none of higher orders.

My completely uneducated guess would be that the kernel can't reap pages
fast enough, so XFS gets impatient waiting for them. That seems like an
issue for mm though but I'd like to confirm if my understanding of what
XFS does is correct.

Most of the memory is used by disk cache:
$ free -g
       total   used   free   shared   buffers   cached
Mem:    3023   3001     22        0         0     2840

Let me know if there is any more info I should provide.

-- 
Anders Ossowicki

_______________________________________________
xfs mailing list
xfs@oss.sgi.com
http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs

             reply	other threads:[~2015-06-01 14:57 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2015-06-01 14:57 Anders Ossowicki [this message]
2015-06-01 21:01 ` "XFS: possible memory allocation deadlock in kmem_alloc" on high memory machine Dave Chinner
2015-06-02 12:06   ` Anders Ossowicki
2015-06-03  1:52     ` Dave Chinner
2015-06-03  7:07       ` Anders Ossowicki
2015-06-03 23:11         ` Dave Chinner

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=20150601145741.GA16608@otto \
    --to=aowi@novozymes.com \
    --cc=xfs@oss.sgi.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body. 
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox