TL;DR: I'm testing Linus's 3.18-rcX in my desktop (x86_64, full load),
experiencing mm races about every day. Current -rc starves the canary of
stablity
Will keep testing (should I try some -mm tree, please? ) , provide you
feedback about the issue.
Not an active kernel-developer.
Long:
Since 26 Oct. upgraded my everything-on-it laptop to new distro (systemd -
based, all new glibc etc.) and switched from 3.17 to 3.18-pre . First time in
years, kernel got unstable.
This machine is occasionaly under heavy load, doing I/O and serving random
desktop applications. (machine is Intel x86_64, dual core, mechanical SATA
disk).
Now, I have a race about once a day, have narrowed them down (guess) to:
[<ffffffff813b1025>] preempt_schedule_irq+0x3c/0x59
[<ffffffff813b4810>] retint_kernel+0x20/0x30
[<ffffffff810d7481>] ? __zone_watermark_ok+0x77/0x85
[<ffffffff810d8256>] zone_watermark_ok+0x1a/0x1c
[<ffffffff810eee56>] compact_zone+0x215/0x4b2
[<ffffffff810ef13f>] compact_zone_order+0x4c/0x5f
[<ffffffff810ef2fe>] try_to_compact_pages+0xc4/0x1e8
[<ffffffff813ad7f8>] __alloc_pages_direct_compact+0x61/0x1bf
[<ffffffff810da299>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x409/0x799
[<ffffffff8110d3fd>] new_slab+0x5f/0x21c
...
Sometimes is a less critical process, that I can safely kill, otherwise I have
to drop everything and reboot.
Unless you are already aware of this case, please accept this feedback.
I'm pulling from Linus, should I also try some of your trees for an early
solution?