From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from psmtp.com (na3sys010amx137.postini.com [74.125.245.137]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 67D656B0313 for ; Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:53:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: Fix kswapd livelock on single core, no preempt kernel From: Shaohua Li In-Reply-To: References: <1323798271-1452-1-git-send-email-mikew@google.com> <1323829490.22361.395.camel@sli10-conroe> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:06:27 +0800 Message-ID: <1323911187.22361.426.camel@sli10-conroe> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: Mike Waychison Cc: Andrew Morton , Mel Gorman , Minchan Kim , KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki , Johannes Weiner , "linux-mm@kvack.org" , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , Hugh Dickens , Greg Thelen On Wed, 2011-12-14 at 12:45 +0800, Mike Waychison wrote: > On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 8:36 PM, Mike Waychison wrote: > > On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Shaohua Li wrote: > >> On Wed, 2011-12-14 at 01:44 +0800, Mike Waychison wrote: > >>> On a single core system with kernel preemption disabled, it is possible > >>> for the memory system to be so taxed that kswapd cannot make any forward > >>> progress. This can happen when most of system memory is tied up as > >>> anonymous memory without swap enabled, causing kswapd to consistently > >>> fail to achieve its watermark goals. In turn, sleeping_prematurely() > >>> will consistently return true and kswapd_try_to_sleep() to never invoke > >>> schedule(). This causes the kswapd thread to stay on the CPU in > >>> perpetuity and keeps other threads from processing oom-kills to reclaim > >>> memory. > >>> > >>> The cond_resched() instance in balance_pgdat() is never called as the > >>> loop that iterates from DEF_PRIORITY down to 0 will always set > >>> all_zones_ok to true, and not set it to false once we've passed > >>> DEF_PRIORITY as zones that are marked ->all_unreclaimable are not > >>> considered in the "all_zones_ok" evaluation. > >>> > >>> This change modifies kswapd_try_to_sleep to ensure that we enter > >>> scheduler at least once per invocation if needed. This allows kswapd to > >>> get off the CPU and allows other threads to die off from the OOM killer > >>> (freeing memory that is otherwise unavailable in the process). > >> your description suggests zones with all_unreclaimable set. but in this > >> case sleeping_prematurely() will return false instead of true, kswapd > >> will do sleep then. is there anything I missed? > > Actually, I don't see where sleeping_prematurely() would return false > if any zone has ->all_unreclaimable set. In this case, the order was > 0, so we return !all_zones_ok, which is false because > !zone_watermark_ok_safe(ZONE_DMA32). so the ZONE_DMA32 hasn't all_unreclaimable set, right? if all zones have all_unreclaimable set, all_zones_ok clearly is true. this means kswapd can reclaim some pages in the zone, which looks sane. Thanks, Shaohua -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: email@kvack.org