Re: [PATCH v2] mm: vmscan: do not throttle based on pfmemalloc reserves if node has no reclaimable pages
From: Vlastimil Babka
Date: Fri Apr 03 2015 - 03:57:46 EST
On 03/31/2015 11:48 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Fri 27-03-15 15:23:50, Nishanth Aravamudan wrote:
On 27.03.2015 [13:17:59 -0700], Dave Hansen wrote:
On 03/27/2015 12:28 PM, Nishanth Aravamudan wrote:
@@ -2585,7 +2585,7 @@ static bool pfmemalloc_watermark_ok(pg_data_t *pgdat)
for (i = 0; i <= ZONE_NORMAL; i++) {
zone = &pgdat->node_zones[i];
- if (!populated_zone(zone))
+ if (!populated_zone(zone) || !zone_reclaimable(zone))
continue;
pfmemalloc_reserve += min_wmark_pages(zone);
Do you really want zone_reclaimable()? Or do you want something more
direct like "zone_reclaimable_pages(zone) == 0"?
Yeah, I guess in my testing this worked out to be the same, since
zone_reclaimable_pages(zone) is 0 and so zone_reclaimable(zone) will
always be false. Thanks!
Based upon 675becce15 ("mm: vmscan: do not throttle based on pfmemalloc
reserves if node has no ZONE_NORMAL") from Mel.
We have a system with the following topology:
# numactl -H
available: 3 nodes (0,2-3)
node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
node 0 size: 28273 MB
node 0 free: 27323 MB
node 2 cpus:
node 2 size: 16384 MB
node 2 free: 0 MB
node 3 cpus: 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47
node 3 size: 30533 MB
node 3 free: 13273 MB
node distances:
node 0 2 3
0: 10 20 20
2: 20 10 20
3: 20 20 10
Node 2 has no free memory, because:
# cat /sys/devices/system/node/node2/hugepages/hugepages-16777216kB/nr_hugepages
1
This leads to the following zoneinfo:
Node 2, zone DMA
pages free 0
min 1840
low 2300
high 2760
scanned 0
spanned 262144
present 262144
managed 262144
...
all_unreclaimable: 1
Blee, this is a weird configuration.
If one then attempts to allocate some normal 16M hugepages via
echo 37 > /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages
The echo never returns and kswapd2 consumes CPU cycles.
This is because throttle_direct_reclaim ends up calling
wait_event(pfmemalloc_wait, pfmemalloc_watermark_ok...).
pfmemalloc_watermark_ok() in turn checks all zones on the node if there
are any reserves, and if so, then indicates the watermarks are ok, by
seeing if there are sufficient free pages.
675becce15 added a condition already for memoryless nodes. In this case,
though, the node has memory, it is just all consumed (and not
reclaimable). Effectively, though, the result is the same on this call
to pfmemalloc_watermark_ok() and thus seems like a reasonable additional
condition.
With this change, the afore-mentioned 16M hugepage allocation attempt
succeeds and correctly round-robins between Nodes 1 and 3.
I am just wondering whether this is the right/complete fix. Don't we
need a similar treatment at more places?
I would expect kswapd would be looping endlessly because the zone
wouldn't be balanced obviously. But I would be wrong... because
pgdat_balanced is doing this:
/*
* A special case here:
*
* balance_pgdat() skips over all_unreclaimable after
* DEF_PRIORITY. Effectively, it considers them balanced so
* they must be considered balanced here as well!
*/
if (!zone_reclaimable(zone)) {
balanced_pages += zone->managed_pages;
continue;
}
and zone_reclaimable is false for you as you didn't have any
zone_reclaimable_pages(). But wakeup_kswapd doesn't do this check so it
would see !zone_balanced() AFAICS (build_zonelists doesn't ignore those
zones right?) and so the kswapd would be woken up easily. So it looks
like a mess.
Yeah, looks like a much cleaner/complete solution would be to remove
such zones from zonelists. But that means covering all situations when
these hugepages are allocated/removed and the approach then looks
similar to memory hotplug.
Also I'm not sure if the ability to actually allocate the reserved
hugepage would be impossible due to not being reachable by a zonelist...
There are possibly other places which rely on populated_zone or
for_each_populated_zone without checking reclaimability. Are those
working as expected?
Yeah. At least the wakeup_kswapd case should be fixed IMHO. No point in
waking it up just to let it immediately go to sleep again.
That being said. I am not objecting to this patch. I am just trying to
wrap my head around possible issues from such a weird configuration and
all the consequences.
Signed-off-by: Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
The patch as is doesn't seem to be harmful.
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxx>
---
v1 -> v2:
Check against zone_reclaimable_pages, rather zone_reclaimable, based
upon feedback from Dave Hansen.
Dunno, but shouldn't we use the same thing here and in pgdat_balanced?
zone_reclaimable_pages seems to be used only from zone_reclaimable().
pgdat_balanced() has a different goal than pfmemalloc_watermark_ok() and
needs to match what balance_pgdat() does, which includes considering
NR_PAGES_SCANNED through zone_reclaimable(). For the situation
considered in this patch, result of zone_reclaimable() will match the
test zone_reclaimable_pages(zone) == 0, so it is fine I think.
What I find somewhat worrying though is that we could potentially break
the pfmemalloc_watermark_ok() test in situations where
zone_reclaimable_pages(zone) == 0 is a transient situation (and not a
permanently allocated hugepage). In that case, the throttling is
supposed to help system recover, and we might be breaking that ability
with this patch, no?
diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 5e8eadd71bac..c627fa4c991f 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -2646,7 +2646,8 @@ static bool pfmemalloc_watermark_ok(pg_data_t *pgdat)
for (i = 0; i <= ZONE_NORMAL; i++) {
zone = &pgdat->node_zones[i];
- if (!populated_zone(zone))
+ if (!populated_zone(zone) ||
+ zone_reclaimable_pages(zone) == 0)
continue;
pfmemalloc_reserve += min_wmark_pages(zone);
--
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