linux.git/mm, branch v3.7

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: vmscan: fix inappropriate zone congestion clearing

2012-12-08T16:41:18+00:00

commit c702418f8a2f ("mm: vmscan: do not keep kswapd looping forever due
to individual uncompactable zones") removed zone watermark checks from
the compaction code in kswapd but left in the zone congestion clearing,
which now happens unconditionally on higher order reclaim.

This messes up the reclaim throttling logic for zones with
dirty/writeback pages, where zones should only lose their congestion
status when their watermarks have been restored.

Remove the clearing from the zone compaction section entirely.  The
preliminary zone check and the reclaim loop in kswapd will clear it if
the zone is considered balanced.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

tmpfs: fix shared mempolicy leak

2012-12-06T19:56:43+00:00

This fixes a regression in 3.7-rc, which has since gone into stable.

Commit 00442ad04a5e ("mempolicy: fix a memory corruption by refcount
imbalance in alloc_pages_vma()") changed get_vma_policy() to raise the
refcount on a shmem shared mempolicy; whereas shmem_alloc_page() went
on expecting alloc_page_vma() to drop the refcount it had acquired.
This deserves a rework: but for now fix the leak in shmem_alloc_page().

Hugh: shmem_swapin() did not need a fix, but surely it's clearer to use
the same refcounting there as in shmem_alloc_page(), delete its onstack
mempolicy, and the strange mpol_cond_copy() and __mpol_cond_copy() -
those were invented to let swapin_readahead() make an unknown number of
calls to alloc_pages_vma() with one mempolicy; but since 00442ad04a5e,
alloc_pages_vma() has kept refcount in balance, so now no problem.

Reported-and-tested-by: Tommi Rantala 
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins 
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: vmscan: do not keep kswapd looping forever due to individual uncompactable zones

2012-12-06T19:29:57+00:00

When a zone meets its high watermark and is compactable in case of
higher order allocations, it contributes to the percentage of the node's
memory that is considered balanced.

This requirement, that a node be only partially balanced, came about
when kswapd was desparately trying to balance tiny zones when all bigger
zones in the node had plenty of free memory.  Arguably, the same should
apply to compaction: if a significant part of the node is balanced
enough to run compaction, do not get hung up on that tiny zone that
might never get in shape.

When the compaction logic in kswapd is reached, we know that at least
25% of the node's memory is balanced properly for compaction (see
zone_balanced and pgdat_balanced).  Remove the individual zone checks
that restart the kswapd cycle.

Otherwise, we may observe more endless looping in kswapd where the
compaction code loops back to reclaim because of a single zone and
reclaim does nothing because the node is considered balanced overall.

See for example

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=866988

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reported-and-tested-by: Thorsten Leemhuis 
Reported-by: Jiri Slaby 
Tested-by: John Ellson 
Tested-by: Zdenek Kabelac 
Tested-by: Bruno Wolff III 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: compaction: validate pfn range passed to isolate_freepages_block

2012-12-06T19:17:33+00:00

Commit 0bf380bc70ec ("mm: compaction: check pfn_valid when entering a
new MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES block during isolation for migration") added a
check for pfn_valid() when isolating pages for migration as the scanner
does not necessarily start pageblock-aligned.

Since commit c89511ab2f8f ("mm: compaction: Restart compaction from near
where it left off"), the free scanner has the same problem.  This patch
makes sure that the pfn range passed to isolate_freepages_block() is
within the same block so that pfn_valid() checks are unnecessary.

In answer to Henrik's wondering why others have not reported this:
reproducing this requires a large enough hole with the right aligment to
have compaction walk into a PFN range with no memmap.  Size and
alignment depends in the memory model - 4M for FLATMEM and 128M for
SPARSEMEM on x86.  It needs a "lucky" machine.

Reported-by: Henrik Rydberg 
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: soft offline: split thp at the beginning of soft_offline_page()

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

When we try to soft-offline a thp tail page, put_page() is called on the
tail page unthinkingly and VM_BUG_ON is triggered in put_compound_page().

This patch splits thp before going into the main body of soft-offlining.

Signed-off-by: Naoya Horiguchi 
Cc: Andi Kleen 
Cc: Tony Luck 
Cc: Andi Kleen 
Cc: Wu Fengguang 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
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: vmscan: fix endless loop in kswapd balancing

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

Kswapd does not in all places have the same criteria for a balanced
zone.  Zones are only being reclaimed when their high watermark is
breached, but compaction checks loop over the zonelist again when the
zone does not meet the low watermark plus two times the size of the
allocation.  This gets kswapd stuck in an endless loop over a small
zone, like the DMA zone, where the high watermark is smaller than the
compaction requirement.

Add a function, zone_balanced(), that checks the watermark, and, for
higher order allocations, if compaction has enough free memory.  Then
use it uniformly to check for balanced zones.

This makes sure that when the compaction watermark is not met, at least
reclaim happens and progress is made - or the zone is declared
unreclaimable at some point and skipped entirely.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reported-by: George Spelvin 
Reported-by: Johannes Hirte 
Reported-by: Tomas Racek 
Tested-by: Johannes Hirte 
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds