Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: disable LRU pagevec during the migration temporarily

Michal Hocko
2021-03-03T17:11:41Z

On Tue 02-03-21 13:09:48, Minchan Kim wrote:
> LRU pagevec holds refcount of pages until the pagevec are drained.
> It could prevent migration since the refcount of the page is greater
> than the expection in migration logic. To mitigate the issue,
> callers of migrate_pages drains LRU pagevec via migrate_prep or
> lru_add_drain_all before migrate_pages call.
>
> However, it's not enough because pages coming into pagevec after the
> draining call still could stay at the pagevec so it could keep
> preventing page migration. Since some callers of migrate_pages have
> retrial logic with LRU draining, the page would migrate at next trail
> but it is still fragile in that it doesn't close the fundamental race
> between upcoming LRU pages into pagvec and migration so the migration
> failure could cause contiguous memory allocation failure in the end.
>
> To close the race, this patch disables lru caches(i.e, pagevec)
> during ongoing migration until migrate is done.
>
> Since it's really hard to reproduce, I measured how many times
> migrate_pages retried with force mode below debug code.
>
> int migrate_pages(struct list_head *from, new_page_t get_new_page,
> ..
> ..
>
> if (rc && reason == MR_CONTIG_RANGE && pass > 2) {
> printk(KERN_ERR, "pfn 0x%lx reason %d\n", page_to_pfn(page), rc);
> dump_page(page, "fail to migrate");
> }
>
> The test was repeating android apps launching with cma allocation
> in background every five seconds. Total cma allocation count was
> about 500 during the testing. With this patch, the dump_page count
> was reduced from 400 to 30.

Have you seen any improvement on the CMA allocation success rate?

> Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
> ---
> * from RFC - http://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210216170348.1513483-1-minchan@kernel.org
> * use atomic and lru_add_drain_all for strict ordering - mhocko
> * lru_cache_disable/enable - mhocko
>
> fs/block_dev.c | 2 +-
> include/linux/migrate.h | 6 +++--
> include/linux/swap.h | 4 ++-
> mm/compaction.c | 4 +--
> mm/fadvise.c | 2 +-
> mm/gup.c | 2 +-
> mm/khugepaged.c | 2 +-
> mm/ksm.c | 2 +-
> mm/memcontrol.c | 4 +--
> mm/memfd.c | 2 +-
> mm/memory-failure.c | 2 +-
> mm/memory_hotplug.c | 2 +-
> mm/mempolicy.c | 6 +++++
> mm/migrate.c | 15 ++++++-----
> mm/page_alloc.c | 5 +++-
> mm/swap.c | 55 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------
> 16 files changed, 85 insertions(+), 30 deletions(-)

The churn seems to be quite big for something that should have been a
very small change. Have you considered not changing lru_add_drain_all
but rather introduce __lru_add_dain_all that would implement the
enforced flushing?

[...]
> +static atomic_t lru_disable_count = ATOMIC_INIT(0);
> +
> +bool lru_cache_disabled(void)
> +{
> + return atomic_read(&lru_disable_count);
> +}
> +
> +void lru_cache_disable(void)
> +{
> + /*
> + * lru_add_drain_all's IPI will make sure no new pages are added
> + * to the pcp lists and drain them all.
> + */
> + atomic_inc(&lru_disable_count);

As already mentioned in the last review. The IPI reference is more
cryptic than useful. I would go with something like this instead

/*
* lru_add_drain_all in the force mode will schedule draining on
* all online CPUs so any calls of lru_cache_disabled wrapped by
* local_lock or preemption disabled would be ordered by that.
* The atomic operation doesn't need to have stronger ordering
* requirements because that is enforece by the scheduling
* guarantees.
*/
> +
> + /*
> + * Clear the LRU lists so pages can be isolated.
> + */
> + lru_add_drain_all(true);
> +}
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs