From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: From: Greg Kroah-Hartman To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, stable@vger.kernel.org Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman , alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk, Sonny Rao , Puneet Kumar , Johannes Weiner , Damien Wyart , Andrew Morton , Linus Torvalds Subject: [ 015/123] mm: fix calculation of dirtyable memory Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2013 12:34:14 -0800 Message-Id: <20130109201500.463211651@linuxfoundation.org> In-Reply-To: <20130109201458.392601412@linuxfoundation.org> References: <20130109201458.392601412@linuxfoundation.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: 3.7-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know. ------------------ From: Sonny Rao commit c8b74c2f6604923de91f8aa6539f8bb934736754 upstream. The system uses global_dirtyable_memory() to calculate number of dirtyable pages/pages that can be allocated to the page cache. A bug causes an underflow thus making the page count look like a big unsigned number. This in turn confuses the dirty writeback throttling to aggressively write back pages as they become dirty (usually 1 page at a time). This generally only affects systems with highmem because the underflowed count gets subtracted from the global count of dirtyable memory. The problem was introduced with v3.2-4896-gab8fabd Fix is to ensure we don't get an underflowed total of either highmem or global dirtyable memory. Signed-off-by: Sonny Rao Signed-off-by: Puneet Kumar Acked-by: Johannes Weiner Tested-by: Damien Wyart Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman --- mm/page-writeback.c | 25 ++++++++++++++++++++----- 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) --- a/mm/page-writeback.c +++ b/mm/page-writeback.c @@ -201,6 +201,18 @@ static unsigned long highmem_dirtyable_m zone_reclaimable_pages(z) - z->dirty_balance_reserve; } /* + * Unreclaimable memory (kernel memory or anonymous memory + * without swap) can bring down the dirtyable pages below + * the zone's dirty balance reserve and the above calculation + * will underflow. However we still want to add in nodes + * which are below threshold (negative values) to get a more + * accurate calculation but make sure that the total never + * underflows. + */ + if ((long)x < 0) + x = 0; + + /* * Make sure that the number of highmem pages is never larger * than the number of the total dirtyable memory. This can only * occur in very strange VM situations but we want to make sure @@ -222,8 +234,8 @@ static unsigned long global_dirtyable_me { unsigned long x; - x = global_page_state(NR_FREE_PAGES) + global_reclaimable_pages() - - dirty_balance_reserve; + x = global_page_state(NR_FREE_PAGES) + global_reclaimable_pages(); + x -= min(x, dirty_balance_reserve); if (!vm_highmem_is_dirtyable) x -= highmem_dirtyable_memory(x); @@ -290,9 +302,12 @@ static unsigned long zone_dirtyable_memo * highmem zone can hold its share of dirty pages, so we don't * care about vm_highmem_is_dirtyable here. */ - return zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES) + - zone_reclaimable_pages(zone) - - zone->dirty_balance_reserve; + unsigned long nr_pages = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES) + + zone_reclaimable_pages(zone); + + /* don't allow this to underflow */ + nr_pages -= min(nr_pages, zone->dirty_balance_reserve); + return nr_pages; } /**