]> git.karo-electronics.de Git - karo-tx-linux.git/commit
mm/page_alloc.c: prevent unending loop in __alloc_pages_slowpath()
authorAndrew Barry <abarry@cray.com>
Wed, 25 May 2011 00:12:52 +0000 (17:12 -0700)
committerAndi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Mon, 1 Aug 2011 20:54:51 +0000 (13:54 -0700)
commitbb590ef04557a915fe6bd2818c23ed9cd46c5f2f
tree8a61a6f5da92537ca7bdf4348b20e85d3e0f2006
parentc7f49dc31ed8d10c288e034a82e1214f2c0c63c2
mm/page_alloc.c: prevent unending loop in __alloc_pages_slowpath()

commit cfa54a0fcfc1017c6f122b6f21aaba36daa07f71 upstream.

I believe I found a problem in __alloc_pages_slowpath, which allows a
process to get stuck endlessly looping, even when lots of memory is
available.

Running an I/O and memory intensive stress-test I see a 0-order page
allocation with __GFP_IO and __GFP_WAIT, running on a system with very
little free memory.  Right about the same time that the stress-test gets
killed by the OOM-killer, the utility trying to allocate memory gets stuck
in __alloc_pages_slowpath even though most of the systems memory was freed
by the oom-kill of the stress-test.

The utility ends up looping from the rebalance label down through the
wait_iff_congested continiously.  Because order=0,
__alloc_pages_direct_compact skips the call to get_page_from_freelist.
Because all of the reclaimable memory on the system has already been
reclaimed, __alloc_pages_direct_reclaim skips the call to
get_page_from_freelist.  Since there is no __GFP_FS flag, the block with
__alloc_pages_may_oom is skipped.  The loop hits the wait_iff_congested,
then jumps back to rebalance without ever trying to
get_page_from_freelist.  This loop repeats infinitely.

The test case is pretty pathological.  Running a mix of I/O stress-tests
that do a lot of fork() and consume all of the system memory, I can pretty
reliably hit this on 600 nodes, in about 12 hours.  32GB/node.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Barry <abarry@cray.com>
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel<riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
mm/page_alloc.c