Re: ppoll() stuck on POLLIN while TCP peer is sending

Mel Gorman
2013-01-09T13:37:52Z

On Tue, Jan 08, 2013 at 11:23:25PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:
> Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> wrote:
> > Please try the following patch. However, even if it works the benefit of
> > capture may be so marginal that partially reverting it and simplifying
> > compaction.c is the better decision.
>
> I already got my VM stuck on this one. I had two twosleepy instances,
> 2774 was the one that got stuck (also confirmed by watching top).
>

page->pfmemalloc can be left set for captured pages so try this but as
capture is rarely used I'm strongly favouring a partial revert even if
this works for you. I haven't reproduced this using your workload yet
but I have found that high-order allocation stress tests for 3.8-rc2 are
completely screwed. 71% success rates at rest in 3.7 and 6% in 3.8-rc2 so
I have to chase that down too.

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 9d20c13..c242d21 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -2180,8 +2180,10 @@ __alloc_pages_direct_compact(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
current->flags &= ~PF_MEMALLOC;

/* If compaction captured a page, prep and use it */
- if (page && !prep_new_page(page, order, gfp_mask))
+ if (page && !prep_new_page(page, order, gfp_mask)) {
+ page->pfmemalloc = false;
goto got_page;
+ }

if (*did_some_progress != COMPACT_SKIPPED) {
/* Page migration frees to the PCP lists but we want merging */