[PATCH 3.10 14/77] mm: vmscan: do not throttle based on pfmemalloc reserves if node has no ZONE_NORMAL

Greg Kroah-Hartman
2014-06-28T19:16:21Z

From: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>

commit 675becce15f320337499bc1a9356260409a5ba29 upstream.

throttle_direct_reclaim() is meant to trigger during swap-over-network
during which the min watermark is treated as a pfmemalloc reserve. It
throttes on the first node in the zonelist but this is flawed.

The user-visible impact is that a process running on CPU whose local
memory node has no ZONE_NORMAL will stall for prolonged periods of time,
possibly indefintely. This is due to throttle_direct_reclaim thinking the
pfmemalloc reserves are depleted when in fact they don't exist on that
node.

On a NUMA machine running a 32-bit kernel (I know) allocation requests
from CPUs on node 1 would detect no pfmemalloc reserves and the process
gets throttled. This patch adjusts throttling of direct reclaim to
throttle based on the first node in the zonelist that has a usable
ZONE_NORMAL or lower zone.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Signed-off-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@linuxfoundation.org>

---
mm/vmscan.c | 43 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------
1 file changed, 37 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -2286,10 +2286,17 @@ static bool pfmemalloc_watermark_ok(pg_d

for (i = 0; i <= ZONE_NORMAL; i++) {
zone = &pgdat->node_zones[i];
+ if (!populated_zone(zone))
+ continue;
+
pfmemalloc_reserve += min_wmark_pages(zone);
free_pages += zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES);
}

+ /* If there are no reserves (unexpected config) then do not throttle */
+ if (!pfmemalloc_reserve)
+ return true;
+
wmark_ok = free_pages > pfmemalloc_reserve / 2;

/* kswapd must be awake if processes are being throttled */
@@ -2314,9 +2321,9 @@ static bool pfmemalloc_watermark_ok(pg_d
static bool throttle_direct_reclaim(gfp_t gfp_mask, struct zonelist *zonelist,
nodemask_t *nodemask)
{
+ struct zoneref *z;
struct zone *zone;
- int high_zoneidx = gfp_zone(gfp_mask);
- pg_data_t *pgdat;
+ pg_data_t *pgdat = NULL;

/*
* Kernel threads should not be throttled as they may be indirectly
@@ -2335,10 +2342,34 @@ static bool throttle_direct_reclaim(gfp_
if (fatal_signal_pending(current))
goto out;

- /* Check if the pfmemalloc reserves are ok */
- first_zones_zonelist(zonelist, high_zoneidx, NULL, &zone);
- pgdat = zone->zone_pgdat;
- if (pfmemalloc_watermark_ok(pgdat))
+ /*
+ * Check if the pfmemalloc reserves are ok by finding the first node
+ * with a usable ZONE_NORMAL or lower zone. The expectation is that
+ * GFP_KERNEL will be required for allocating network buffers when
+ * swapping over the network so ZONE_HIGHMEM is unusable.
+ *
+ * Throttling is based on the first usable node and throttled processes
+ * wait on a queue until kswapd makes progress and wakes them. There
+ * is an affinity then between processes waking up and where reclaim
+ * progress has been made assuming the process wakes on the same node.
+ * More importantly, processes running on remote nodes will not compete
+ * for remote pfmemalloc reserves and processes on different nodes
+ * should make reasonable progress.
+ */
+ for_each_zone_zonelist_nodemask(zone, z, zonelist,
+ gfp_mask, nodemask) {
+ if (zone_idx(zone) > ZONE_NORMAL)
+ continue;
+
+ /* Throttle based on the first usable node */
+ pgdat = zone->zone_pgdat;
+ if (pfmemalloc_watermark_ok(pgdat))
+ goto out;
+ break;
+ }
+
+ /* If no zone was usable by the allocation flags then do not throttle */
+ if (!pgdat)
goto out;

/* Account for the throttling */