vmscan: all_unreclaimable() use zone->all_unreclaimable as a name
authorKOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Thu, 14 Apr 2011 22:22:12 +0000 (15:22 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:06:56 +0000 (16:06 -0700)
commit929bea7c714220fc76ce3f75bef9056477c28e74
treed41b4592b658173e00c7b8bad2bce048f02e0ead
parentfe936dfc23fed3475b11067e8d9b70553eafcd9e
vmscan: all_unreclaimable() use zone->all_unreclaimable as a name

all_unreclaimable check in direct reclaim has been introduced at 2.6.19
by following commit.

2006 Sep 25; commit 408d8544; oom: use unreclaimable info

And it went through strange history. firstly, following commit broke
the logic unintentionally.

2008 Apr 29; commit a41f24ea; page allocator: smarter retry of
      costly-order allocations

Two years later, I've found obvious meaningless code fragment and
restored original intention by following commit.

2010 Jun 04; commit bb21c7ce; vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages()
      return value when priority==0

But, the logic didn't works when 32bit highmem system goes hibernation
and Minchan slightly changed the algorithm and fixed it .

2010 Sep 22: commit d1908362: vmscan: check all_unreclaimable
      in direct reclaim path

But, recently, Andrey Vagin found the new corner case. Look,

struct zone {
  ..
        int                     all_unreclaimable;
  ..
        unsigned long           pages_scanned;
  ..
}

zone->all_unreclaimable and zone->pages_scanned are neigher atomic
variables nor protected by lock.  Therefore zones can become a state of
zone->page_scanned=0 and zone->all_unreclaimable=1.  In this case, current
all_unreclaimable() return false even though zone->all_unreclaimabe=1.

This resulted in the kernel hanging up when executing a loop of the form

1. fork
2. mmap
3. touch memory
4. read memory
5. munmmap

as described in
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/1348725#1348725

Is this ignorable minor issue?  No.  Unfortunately, x86 has very small dma
zone and it become zone->all_unreclamble=1 easily.  and if it become
all_unreclaimable=1, it never restore all_unreclaimable=0.  Why?  if
all_unreclaimable=1, vmscan only try DEF_PRIORITY reclaim and
a-few-lru-pages>>DEF_PRIORITY always makes 0.  that mean no page scan at
all!

Eventually, oom-killer never works on such systems.  That said, we can't
use zone->pages_scanned for this purpose.  This patch restore
all_unreclaimable() use zone->all_unreclaimable as old.  and in addition,
to add oom_killer_disabled check to avoid reintroduce the issue of commit
d1908362 ("vmscan: check all_unreclaimable in direct reclaim path").

Reported-by: Andrey Vagin <avagin@openvz.org>
Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm/vmscan.c