Re: [PATCH] mm: Fix kswapd livelock on single core, no preemptkernel

[James Bottomley]

On Tue, 2011-12-13 at 09:44 -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).

This keeps cropping up.  I think it's not the same as the last time I
saw it (which was on a multi-core system) but it was definitely caused
by an issue with sleeping_prematurely().  For reference, this is the
thread:

http://marc.info/?t=130436700400001

And this was the eventual fix that worked for me:

http://marc.info/?t=130892304300003

James


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