[PATCHv5] mm: Fix calculation of dirtyable memory

[Sonny Rao]

The system uses global_dirtyable_memory() to calculate
number of dirtyable pages/pages that can be allocated
to the page cache.  A bug causes an underflow thus making
the page count look like a big unsigned number.  This in turn
confuses the dirty writeback throttling to aggressively write
back pages as they become dirty (usually 1 page at a time).
This generally only affects systems with highmem because the
underflowed count gets subtracted from the global count of
dirtyable memory.

The problem was introduced with v3.2-4896-gab8fabd

Fix is to ensure we don't get an underflowed total of either highmem
or global dirtyable memory.

Signed-off-by: Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Puneet Kumar <puneetster@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
---
 v2: added apkm's suggestion to make the highmem calculation better
 v3: added Fengguang Wu's suggestions fix zone_dirtyable_memory() and
     (offlist mail) to use max() in global_dirtyable_memory()
 v4: Added suggestions to description clarifying the role of highmem
      and the commit which originally caused the problem
 v5: Fix bug where max() was used instead of min()
 mm/page-writeback.c |   25 ++++++++++++++++++++-----
 1 files changed, 20 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/page-writeback.c b/mm/page-writeback.c
index 830893b..f9efbe8 100644
--- a/mm/page-writeback.c
+++ b/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -201,6 +201,18 @@ static unsigned long highmem_dirtyable_memory(unsigned long total)
 		     zone_reclaimable_pages(z) - z->dirty_balance_reserve;
 	}
 	/*
+	 * Unreclaimable memory (kernel memory or anonymous memory
+	 * without swap) can bring down the dirtyable pages below
+	 * the zone's dirty balance reserve and the above calculation
+	 * will underflow.  However we still want to add in nodes
+	 * which are below threshold (negative values) to get a more
+	 * accurate calculation but make sure that the total never
+	 * underflows.
+	 */
+	if ((long)x < 0)
+		x = 0;
+
+	/*
 	 * Make sure that the number of highmem pages is never larger
 	 * than the number of the total dirtyable memory. This can only
 	 * occur in very strange VM situations but we want to make sure
@@ -222,8 +234,8 @@ static unsigned long global_dirtyable_memory(void)
 {
 	unsigned long x;
 
-	x = global_page_state(NR_FREE_PAGES) + global_reclaimable_pages() -
-	    dirty_balance_reserve;
+	x = global_page_state(NR_FREE_PAGES) + global_reclaimable_pages();
+	x -= min(x, dirty_balance_reserve);
 
 	if (!vm_highmem_is_dirtyable)
 		x -= highmem_dirtyable_memory(x);
@@ -290,9 +302,12 @@ static unsigned long zone_dirtyable_memory(struct zone *zone)
 	 * highmem zone can hold its share of dirty pages, so we don't
 	 * care about vm_highmem_is_dirtyable here.
 	 */
-	return zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES) +
-	       zone_reclaimable_pages(zone) -
-	       zone->dirty_balance_reserve;
+	unsigned long nr_pages = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES) +
+		zone_reclaimable_pages(zone);
+
+	/* don't allow this to underflow */
+	nr_pages -= min(nr_pages, zone->dirty_balance_reserve);
+	return nr_pages;
 }
 
 /**
-- 
1.7.7.3

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