Commit 4746efde authored Jul 19, 2011 by Shaohua Li Committed by Linus Torvalds Jul 19, 2011

vmscan: fix a livelock in kswapd



I'm running a workload which triggers a lot of swap in a machine with 4
nodes.  After I kill the workload, I found a kswapd livelock.  Sometimes
kswapd3 or kswapd2 are keeping running and I can't access filesystem,
but most memory is free.

This looks like a regression since commit 08951e54 ("mm: vmscan:
correct check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely").

Node 2 and 3 have only ZONE_NORMAL, but balance_pgdat() will return 0
for classzone_idx.  The reason is end_zone in balance_pgdat() is 0 by
default, if all zones have watermark ok, end_zone will keep 0.

Later sleeping_prematurely() always returns true.  Because this is an
order 3 wakeup, and if classzone_idx is 0, both balanced_pages and
present_pages in pgdat_balanced() are 0.  We add a special case here.
If a zone has no page, we think it's balanced.  This fixes the livelock.

Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

parent f7b88631

mm/vmscan.c

+2 −1

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -2310,7 +2310,8 @@ static bool pgdat_balanced(pg_data_t *pgdat, unsigned long balanced_pages,
		for (i = 0; i <= classzone_idx; i++)
		present_pages += pgdat->node_zones[i].present_pages;

		return balanced_pages > (present_pages >> 2);
		/* A special case here: if zone has no page, we think it's balanced */
		return balanced_pages >= (present_pages >> 2);
		}

		/* is kswapd sleeping prematurely? */

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