Patch "xfs: Timely free truncated dirty pages" has been added to the 4.9-stable tree

Patch "xfs: Timely free truncated dirty pages" has been added to the 4.9-stable tree

[gregkh]

This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

    xfs: Timely free truncated dirty pages

to the 4.9-stable tree which can be found at:
    http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:
     xfs-timely-free-truncated-dirty-pages.patch
and it can be found in the queue-4.9 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree,
please let <stable@vger.kernel.org> know about it.


>From 0a417b8dc1f10b03e8f558b8a831f07ec4c23795 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2017 10:20:04 -0800
Subject: xfs: Timely free truncated dirty pages
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

From: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>

commit 0a417b8dc1f10b03e8f558b8a831f07ec4c23795 upstream.

Commit 99579ccec4e2 "xfs: skip dirty pages in ->releasepage()" started
to skip dirty pages in xfs_vm_releasepage() which also has the effect
that if a dirty page is truncated, it does not get freed by
block_invalidatepage() and is lingering in LRU list waiting for reclaim.
So a simple loop like:

while true; do
	dd if=/dev/zero of=file bs=1M count=100
	rm file
done

will keep using more and more memory until we hit low watermarks and
start pagecache reclaim which will eventually reclaim also the truncate
pages. Keeping these truncated (and thus never usable) pages in memory
is just a waste of memory, is unnecessarily stressing page cache
reclaim, and reportedly also leads to anonymous mmap(2) returning ENOMEM
prematurely.

So instead of just skipping dirty pages in xfs_vm_releasepage(), return
to old behavior of skipping them only if they have delalloc or unwritten
buffers and fix the spurious warnings by warning only if the page is
clean.

CC: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
CC: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Reported-by: Petr Tůma <petr.tuma@d3s.mff.cuni.cz>
Fixes: 99579ccec4e271c3d4d4e7c946058766812afdab
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

---
 fs/xfs/xfs_aops.c |   19 +++++++++++--------
 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)

--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_aops.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_aops.c
@@ -1158,19 +1158,22 @@ xfs_vm_releasepage(
 	 * block_invalidatepage() can send pages that are still marked dirty
 	 * but otherwise have invalidated buffers.
 	 *
-	 * We've historically freed buffers on the latter. Instead, quietly
-	 * filter out all dirty pages to avoid spurious buffer state warnings.
-	 * This can likely be removed once shrink_active_list() is fixed.
+	 * We want to release the latter to avoid unnecessary buildup of the
+	 * LRU, skip the former and warn if we've left any lingering
+	 * delalloc/unwritten buffers on clean pages. Skip pages with delalloc
+	 * or unwritten buffers and warn if the page is not dirty. Otherwise
+	 * try to release the buffers.
 	 */
-	if (PageDirty(page))
-		return 0;
-
 	xfs_count_page_state(page, &delalloc, &unwritten);
 
-	if (WARN_ON_ONCE(delalloc))
+	if (delalloc) {
+		WARN_ON_ONCE(!PageDirty(page));
 		return 0;
-	if (WARN_ON_ONCE(unwritten))
+	}
+	if (unwritten) {
+		WARN_ON_ONCE(!PageDirty(page));
 		return 0;
+	}
 
 	return try_to_free_buffers(page);
 }


Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from jack@suse.cz are

queue-4.9/xfs-timely-free-truncated-dirty-pages.patch
queue-4.9/dax-fix-deadlock-with-dax-4k-holes.patch