Re: [PATCH] mm, vmscan: do not loop on too_many_isolated for ever

[Tetsuo Handa]

Hugh Dickins wrote:
> You probably won't welcome getting into alternatives at this late stage;
> but after hacking around it one way or another because of its pointless
> lockups, I lost patience with that too_many_isolated() loop a few months
> back (on realizing the enormous number of pages that may be isolated via
> migrate_pages(2)), and we've been running nicely since with something like:
> 
> 	bool got_mutex = false;
> 
> 	if (unlikely(too_many_isolated(pgdat, file, sc))) {
> 		if (mutex_lock_killable(&pgdat->too_many_isolated))
> 			return SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX;
> 		got_mutex = true;
> 	}
> 	...
> 	if (got_mutex)
> 		mutex_unlock(&pgdat->too_many_isolated);
> 
> Using a mutex to provide the intended throttling, without an infinite
> loop or an arbitrary delay; and without having to worry (as we often did)
> about whether those numbers in too_many_isolated() are really appropriate.
> No premature OOMs complained of yet.

Roughly speaking, there is a moment where shrink_inactive_list() acts
like below.

	bool got_mutex = false;

	if (!current_is_kswapd()) {
		if (mutex_lock_killable(&pgdat->too_many_isolated))
			return SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX;
		got_mutex = true;
	}

	// kswapd is blocked here waiting for !current_is_kswapd().

	if (got_mutex)
		mutex_unlock(&pgdat->too_many_isolated);

> 
> But that was on a different kernel, and there I did have to make sure
> that PF_MEMALLOC always prevented us from nesting: I'm not certain of
> that in the current kernel (but do remember Johannes changing the memcg
> end to make it use PF_MEMALLOC too).  I offer the preview above, to see
> if you're interested in that alternative: if you are, then I'll go ahead
> and make it into an actual patch against v4.13-rc.

I don't know what your actual patch looks like, but the problem is that
pgdat->too_many_isolated waits for kswapd while kswapd waits for
pgdat->too_many_isolated; nobody can unlock pgdat->too_many_isolated if
once we hit it.