mm: vmscan: correct check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely
During allocator-intensive workloads, kswapd will be woken frequently
causing free memory to oscillate between the high and min watermark. This
is expected behaviour. Unfortunately, if the highest zone is small, a
problem occurs.
This seems to happen most with recent sandybridge laptops but it's
probably a co-incidence as some of these laptops just happen to have a
small Normal zone. The reproduction case is almost always during copying
large files that kswapd pegs at 100% CPU until the file is deleted or
cache is dropped.
The problem is mostly down to sleeping_prematurely() keeping kswapd awake
when the highest zone is small and unreclaimable and compounded by the
fact we shrink slabs even when not shrinking zones causing a lot of time
to be spent in shrinkers and a lot of memory to be reclaimed.
Patch 1 corrects sleeping_prematurely to check the zones matching
the classzone_idx instead of all zones.
Patch 2 avoids shrinking slab when we are not shrinking a zone.
Patch 3 notes that sleeping_prematurely is checking lower zones against
a high classzone which is not what allocators or balance_pgdat()
is doing leading to an artifical belief that kswapd should be
still awake.
Patch 4 notes that when balance_pgdat() gives up on a high zone that the
decision is not communicated to sleeping_prematurely()
This problem affects 2.6.38.8 for certain and is expected to affect 2.6.39
and 3.0-rc4 as well. If accepted, they need to go to -stable to be picked
up by distros and this series is against 3.0-rc4. I've cc'd people that
reported similar problems recently to see if they still suffer from the
problem and if this fixes it.
This patch: correct the check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely()
During allocator-intensive workloads, kswapd will be woken frequently
causing free memory to oscillate between the high and min watermark. This
is expected behaviour.
A problem occurs if the highest zone is small. balance_pgdat() only
considers unreclaimable zones when priority is DEF_PRIORITY but
sleeping_prematurely considers all zones. It's possible for this sequence
to occur
1. kswapd wakes up and enters balance_pgdat()
2. At DEF_PRIORITY, marks highest zone unreclaimable
3. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, ignores highest zone setting end_zone
4. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, calls shrink_slab freeing memory from
highest zone, clearing all_unreclaimable. Highest zone
is still unbalanced
5. kswapd returns and calls sleeping_prematurely
6. sleeping_prematurely looks at *all* zones, not just the ones
being considered by balance_pgdat. The highest small zone
has all_unreclaimable cleared but the zone is not
balanced. all_zones_ok is false so kswapd stays awake
This patch corrects the behaviour of sleeping_prematurely to check the
zones balance_pgdat() checked.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Reported-by: Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com> Tested-by: Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com> Tested-by: Andrew Lutomirski <luto@mit.edu> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>