[099/146] mm/page_alloc.c: prevent unending loop in

Greg KH
2011-06-01T08:15:22Z

__alloc_pages_slowpath()

From: Andrew Barry <abarry@cray.com>

commit cfa54a0fcfc1017c6f122b6f21aaba36daa07f71 upstream.

I believe I found a problem in __alloc_pages_slowpath, which allows a
process to get stuck endlessly looping, even when lots of memory is
available.

Running an I/O and memory intensive stress-test I see a 0-order page
allocation with __GFP_IO and __GFP_WAIT, running on a system with very
little free memory. Right about the same time that the stress-test gets
killed by the OOM-killer, the utility trying to allocate memory gets stuck
in __alloc_pages_slowpath even though most of the systems memory was freed
by the oom-kill of the stress-test.

The utility ends up looping from the rebalance label down through the
wait_iff_congested continiously. Because order=0,
__alloc_pages_direct_compact skips the call to get_page_from_freelist.
Because all of the reclaimable memory on the system has already been
reclaimed, __alloc_pages_direct_reclaim skips the call to
get_page_from_freelist. Since there is no __GFP_FS flag, the block with
__alloc_pages_may_oom is skipped. The loop hits the wait_iff_congested,
then jumps back to rebalance without ever trying to
get_page_from_freelist. This loop repeats infinitely.

The test case is pretty pathological. Running a mix of I/O stress-tests
that do a lot of fork() and consume all of the system memory, I can pretty
reliably hit this on 600 nodes, in about 12 hours. 32GB/node.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Barry <abarry@cray.com>
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel<riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

---
mm/page_alloc.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -2044,6 +2044,7 @@ restart:
first_zones_zonelist(zonelist, high_zoneidx, NULL,
&preferred_zone);

+rebalance:
/* This is the last chance, in general, before the goto nopage. */
page = get_page_from_freelist(gfp_mask, nodemask, order, zonelist,
high_zoneidx, alloc_flags & ~ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS,
@@ -2051,7 +2052,6 @@ restart:
if (page)
goto got_pg;

-rebalance:
/* Allocate without watermarks if the context allows */
if (alloc_flags & ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS) {
page = __alloc_pages_high_priority(gfp_mask, order,