linux-stable.git/mm/page_alloc.c, branch v3.7.4

mm: compaction: partially revert capture of suitable high-order page

2013-01-17T16:46:10+00:00

commit 8fb74b9fb2b182d54beee592350d9ea1f325917a upstream.

Eric Wong reported on 3.7 and 3.8-rc2 that ppoll() got stuck when
waiting for POLLIN on a local TCP socket.  It was easier to trigger if
there was disk IO and dirty pages at the same time and he bisected it to
commit 1fb3f8ca0e92 ("mm: compaction: capture a suitable high-order page
immediately when it is made available").

The intention of that patch was to improve high-order allocations under
memory pressure after changes made to reclaim in 3.6 drastically hurt
THP allocations but the approach was flawed.  For Eric, the problem was
that page->pfmemalloc was not being cleared for captured pages leading
to a poor interaction with swap-over-NFS support causing the packets to
be dropped.  However, I identified a few more problems with the patch
including the fact that it can increase contention on zone->lock in some
cases which could result in async direct compaction being aborted early.

In retrospect the capture patch took the wrong approach.  What it should
have done is mark the pageblock being migrated as MIGRATE_ISOLATE if it
was allocating for THP and avoided races that way.  While the patch was
showing to improve allocation success rates at the time, the benefit is
marginal given the relative complexity and it should be revisited from
scratch in the context of the other reclaim-related changes that have
taken place since the patch was first written and tested.  This patch
partially reverts commit 1fb3f8ca0e92 ("mm: compaction: capture a
suitable high-order page immediately when it is made available").

Reported-and-tested-by: Eric Wong 
Tested-by: Eric Dumazet 
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: David Miller 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

mm: use aligned zone start for pfn_to_bitidx calculation

2013-01-17T16:45:54+00:00

commit c060f943d0929f3e429c5d9522290584f6281d6e upstream.

The current calculation in pfn_to_bitidx assumes that (pfn -
zone->zone_start_pfn) >> pageblock_order will return the same bit for
all pfn in a pageblock.  If zone_start_pfn is not aligned to
pageblock_nr_pages, this may not always be correct.

Consider the following with pageblock order = 10, zone start 2MB:

  pfn     | pfn - zone start | (pfn - zone start) >> page block order
  ----------------------------------------------------------------
  0x26000 | 0x25e00	   |  0x97
  0x26100 | 0x25f00	   |  0x97
  0x26200 | 0x26000	   |  0x98
  0x26300 | 0x26100	   |  0x98

This means that calling {get,set}_pageblock_migratetype on a single page
will not set the migratetype for the full block.  Fix this by rounding
down zone_start_pfn when doing the bitidx calculation.

For our use case, the effects of this bug were mostly tied to the fact
that CMA allocations would either take a long time or fail to happen.
Depending on the driver using CMA, this could result in anything from
visual glitches to application failures.

Signed-off-by: Laura Abbott 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

Revert "revert "Revert "mm: remove __GFP_NO_KSWAPD""" and associated damage

2012-12-10T19:03:05+00:00

This reverts commits a50915394f1fc02c2861d3b7ce7014788aa5066e and
d7c3b937bdf45f0b844400b7bf6fd3ed50bac604.

This is a revert of a revert of a revert.  In addition, it reverts the
even older i915 change to stop using the __GFP_NO_KSWAPD flag due to the
original commits in linux-next.

It turns out that the original patch really was bogus, and that the
original revert was the correct thing to do after all.  We thought we
had fixed the problem, and then reverted the revert, but the problem
really is fundamental: waking up kswapd simply isn't the right thing to
do, and direct reclaim sometimes simply _is_ the right thing to do.

When certain allocations fail, we simply should try some direct reclaim,
and if that fails, fail the allocation.  That's the right thing to do
for THP allocations, which can easily fail, and the GPU allocations want
to do that too.

So starting kswapd is sometimes simply wrong, and removing the flag that
said "don't start kswapd" was a mistake.  Let's hope we never revisit
this mistake again - and certainly not this many times ;)

Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Revert "mm: avoid waking kswapd for THP allocations when compaction is deferred or contended"

2012-12-10T18:47:45+00:00

This reverts commit 782fd30406ecb9d9b082816abe0c6008fc72a7b0.

We are going to reinstate the __GFP_NO_KSWAPD flag that has been
removed, the removal reverted, and then removed again.  Making this
commit a pointless fixup for a problem that was caused by the removal of
__GFP_NO_KSWAPD flag.

The thing is, we really don't want to wake up kswapd for THP allocations
(because they fail quite commonly under any kind of memory pressure,
including when there is tons of memory free), and these patches were
just trying to fix up the underlying bug: the original removal of
__GFP_NO_KSWAPD in commit c654345924f7 ("mm: remove __GFP_NO_KSWAPD")
was simply bogus.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: avoid waking kswapd for THP allocations when compaction is deferred or contended

2012-11-30T16:51:18+00:00

With "mm: vmscan: scale number of pages reclaimed by reclaim/compaction
based on failures" reverted, Zdenek Kabelac reported the following

  Hmm,  so it's just took longer to hit the problem and observe
  kswapd0 spinning on my CPU again - it's not as endless like before -
  but still it easily eats minutes - it helps to turn off  Firefox
  or TB  (memory hungry apps) so kswapd0 stops soon - and restart
  those apps again.  (And I still have like >1GB of cached memory)

  kswapd0         R  running task        0    30      2 0x00000000
  Call Trace:
    preempt_schedule+0x42/0x60
    _raw_spin_unlock+0x55/0x60
    put_super+0x31/0x40
    drop_super+0x22/0x30
    prune_super+0x149/0x1b0
    shrink_slab+0xba/0x510

The sysrq+m indicates the system has no swap so it'll never reclaim
anonymous pages as part of reclaim/compaction.  That is one part of the
problem but not the root cause as file-backed pages could also be
reclaimed.

The likely underlying problem is that kswapd is woken up or kept awake
for each THP allocation request in the page allocator slow path.

If compaction fails for the requesting process then compaction will be
deferred for a time and direct reclaim is avoided.  However, if there
are a storm of THP requests that are simply rejected, it will still be
the the case that kswapd is awake for a prolonged period of time as
pgdat->kswapd_max_order is updated each time.  This is noticed by the
main kswapd() loop and it will not call kswapd_try_to_sleep().  Instead
it will loopp, shrinking a small number of pages and calling
shrink_slab() on each iteration.

This patch defers when kswapd gets woken up for THP allocations.  For
!THP allocations, kswapd is always woken up.  For THP allocations,
kswapd is woken up iff the process is willing to enter into direct
reclaim/compaction.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix typo in comment]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Zdenek Kabelac 
Cc: Seth Jennings 
Cc: Jiri Slaby 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Robert Jennings 
Cc: Valdis Kletnieks 
Cc: Glauber Costa 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

revert "Revert "mm: remove __GFP_NO_KSWAPD""

2012-11-30T16:51:17+00:00

It apepars that this patch was innocent, and we hope that "mm: avoid
waking kswapd for THP allocations when compaction is deferred or
contended" will fix the final kswapd-spinning cause.

Cc: Zdenek Kabelac 
Cc: Seth Jennings 
Cc: Valdis Kletnieks 
Cc: Jiri Slaby 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Robert Jennings 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: compaction: fix return value of capture_free_page()

2012-11-30T16:51:17+00:00

Commit ef6c5be658f6 ("fix incorrect NR_FREE_PAGES accounting (appears
like memory leak)") fixes a NR_FREE_PAGE accounting leak but missed the
return value which was also missed by this reviewer until today.

That return value is used by compaction when adding pages to a list of
isolated free pages and without this follow-up fix, there is a risk of
free list corruption.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Dave Hansen 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Revert "mm: remove __GFP_NO_KSWAPD"

2012-11-27T01:41:24+00:00

With "mm: vmscan: scale number of pages reclaimed by reclaim/compaction
based on failures" reverted, Zdenek Kabelac reported the following

  Hmm,  so it's just took longer to hit the problem and observe
  kswapd0 spinning on my CPU again - it's not as endless like before -
  but still it easily eats minutes - it helps to	turn off  Firefox
  or TB  (memory hungry apps) so kswapd0 stops soon - and restart
  those apps again.  (And I still have like >1GB of cached memory)

  kswapd0         R  running task        0    30      2 0x00000000
  Call Trace:
    preempt_schedule+0x42/0x60
    _raw_spin_unlock+0x55/0x60
    put_super+0x31/0x40
    drop_super+0x22/0x30
    prune_super+0x149/0x1b0
    shrink_slab+0xba/0x510

The sysrq+m indicates the system has no swap so it'll never reclaim
anonymous pages as part of reclaim/compaction.  That is one part of the
problem but not the root cause as file-backed pages could also be
reclaimed.

The likely underlying problem is that kswapd is woken up or kept awake
for each THP allocation request in the page allocator slow path.

If compaction fails for the requesting process then compaction will be
deferred for a time and direct reclaim is avoided.  However, if there
are a storm of THP requests that are simply rejected, it will still be
the the case that kswapd is awake for a prolonged period of time as
pgdat->kswapd_max_order is updated each time.  This is noticed by the
main kswapd() loop and it will not call kswapd_try_to_sleep().  Instead
it will loopp, shrinking a small number of pages and calling
shrink_slab() on each iteration.

The temptation is to supply a patch that checks if kswapd was woken for
THP and if so ignore pgdat->kswapd_max_order but it'll be a hack and not
backed up by proper testing.  As 3.7 is very close to release and this
is not a bug we should release with, a safer path is to revert "mm:
remove __GFP_NO_KSWAPD" for now and revisit it with the view to ironing
out the balance_pgdat() logic in general.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Zdenek Kabelac 
Cc: Seth Jennings 
Cc: Valdis Kletnieks 
Cc: Jiri Slaby 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Robert Jennings 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

fix incorrect NR_FREE_PAGES accounting (appears like memory leak)

2012-11-21T22:33:16+00:00

There have been some 3.7-rc reports of vm issues, including some kswapd
bugs and, more importantly, some memory "leaks":

	http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg46187.html
	https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50181

Commit 1fb3f8ca0e92 ("mm: compaction: capture a suitable high-order page
immediately when it is made available") took split_free_page() and
reused it for the compaction code.  It does something curious with
capture_free_page() (previously known as split_free_page()):

  int capture_free_page(struct page *page, int alloc_order,
  ...
          __mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES, -(1UL << order));

  -       /* Split into individual pages */
  -       set_page_refcounted(page);
  -       split_page(page, order);
  +       if (alloc_order != order)
  +               expand(zone, page, alloc_order, order,
  +                       &zone->free_area[order], migratetype);

Note that expand() puts the pages _back_ in the allocator, but it does
not bump NR_FREE_PAGES.  We "return" 'alloc_order' worth of pages, but
we accounted for removing 'order' in the __mod_zone_page_state() call.

For the old split_page()-style use (order==alloc_order) the bug will not
trigger.  But, when called from the compaction code where we
occasionally get a larger page out of the buddy allocator than we need,
we will run in to this.

This patch simply changes the NR_FREE_PAGES manipulation to the correct
'alloc_order' instead of 'order'.

I've been able to repeatedly trigger this in my testing environment.
The amount "leaked" very closely tracks the imbalance I see in buddy
pages vs.  NR_FREE_PAGES.  I have confirmed that this patch fixes the
imbalance

Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

revert "mm: fix-up zone present pages"

2012-11-16T22:33:04+00:00

Revert commit 7f1290f2f2a4 ("mm: fix-up zone present pages")

That patch tried to fix a issue when calculating zone->present_pages,
but it caused a regression on 32bit systems with HIGHMEM.  With that
change, reset_zone_present_pages() resets all zone->present_pages to
zero, and fixup_zone_present_pages() is called to recalculate
zone->present_pages when the boot allocator frees core memory pages into
buddy allocator.  Because highmem pages are not freed by bootmem
allocator, all highmem zones' present_pages becomes zero.

Various options for improving the situation are being discussed but for
now, let's return to the 3.6 code.

Cc: Jianguo Wu 
Cc: Jiang Liu 
Cc: Petr Tesarik 
Cc: "Luck, Tony" 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Yinghai Lu 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Acked-by: David Rientjes 
Tested-by: Chris Clayton 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds