[34-longterm 022/179] mm/page_alloc.c: prevent unending loop in __alloc_pages_slowpath()

[Paul Gortmaker]

From: Andrew Barry <abarry@xxxxxxxx>

                   -------------------
    This is a commit scheduled for the next v2.6.34 longterm release.
    http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/paulg/longterm-queue-2.6.34.git
    If you see a problem with using this for longterm, please comment.
                   -------------------

commit cfa54a0fcfc1017c6f122b6f21aaba36daa07f71 upstream.

I believe I found a problem in __alloc_pages_slowpath, which allows a
process to get stuck endlessly looping, even when lots of memory is
available.

Running an I/O and memory intensive stress-test I see a 0-order page
allocation with __GFP_IO and __GFP_WAIT, running on a system with very
little free memory.  Right about the same time that the stress-test gets
killed by the OOM-killer, the utility trying to allocate memory gets stuck
in __alloc_pages_slowpath even though most of the systems memory was freed
by the oom-kill of the stress-test.

The utility ends up looping from the rebalance label down through the
wait_iff_congested continiously.  Because order=0,
__alloc_pages_direct_compact skips the call to get_page_from_freelist.
Because all of the reclaimable memory on the system has already been
reclaimed, __alloc_pages_direct_reclaim skips the call to
get_page_from_freelist.  Since there is no __GFP_FS flag, the block with
__alloc_pages_may_oom is skipped.  The loop hits the wait_iff_congested,
then jumps back to rebalance without ever trying to
get_page_from_freelist.  This loop repeats infinitely.

The test case is pretty pathological.  Running a mix of I/O stress-tests
that do a lot of fork() and consume all of the system memory, I can pretty
reliably hit this on 600 nodes, in about 12 hours.  32GB/node.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Barry <abarry@xxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@xxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel<riel@xxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
 mm/page_alloc.c |    2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 9826a8d..1418be7 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -1863,6 +1863,7 @@ restart:
 	 */
 	alloc_flags = gfp_to_alloc_flags(gfp_mask);
 
+rebalance:
 	/* This is the last chance, in general, before the goto nopage. */
 	page = get_page_from_freelist(gfp_mask, nodemask, order, zonelist,
 			high_zoneidx, alloc_flags & ~ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS,
@@ -1870,7 +1871,6 @@ restart:
 	if (page)
 		goto got_pg;
 
-rebalance:
 	/* Allocate without watermarks if the context allows */
 	if (alloc_flags & ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS) {
 		page = __alloc_pages_high_priority(gfp_mask, order,
-- 
1.7.9.6

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