difficult to pinpoint exhaustion of swap between 4.2.0-rc6 and 4.2.0-rc7

From: Arthur Marsh
Date: Wed Aug 19 2015 - 11:45:05 EST


Hi, I've found that the Linus' git head kernel has had some unwelcome behaviour where chromium browser would exhaust all swap space in the course of a few hours. The behaviour appeared before the release of 4.2.0-rc7.

This does not happen with kernel 4.2.0-rc6.

When I tried a git-bisect, the results where not conclusive due to the problem taking over an hour to appear after booting, the closest I came was around this commit (the actual problem may be a few commits either side):

git bisect good
4f258a46346c03fa0bbb6199ffaf4e1f9f599660 is the first bad commit
commit 4f258a46346c03fa0bbb6199ffaf4e1f9f599660
Author: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue Jun 23 12:13:59 2015 -0400

sd: Fix maximum I/O size for BLOCK_PC requests

Commit bcdb247c6b6a ("sd: Limit transfer length") clamped the maximum
size of an I/O request to the MAXIMUM TRANSFER LENGTH field in the BLOCK
LIMITS VPD. This had the unfortunate effect of also limiting the maximum
size of non-filesystem requests sent to the device through sg/bsg.

Avoid using blk_queue_max_hw_sectors() and set the max_sectors queue
limit directly.

Also update the comment in blk_limits_max_hw_sectors() to clarify that
max_hw_sectors defines the limit for the I/O controller only.

Signed-off-by: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reported-by: Brian King <brking@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Tested-by: Brian King <brking@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # 3.17+
Signed-off-by: James Bottomley <JBottomley@xxxxxxxx>

:040000 040000 fbd0519d9ee0a8f92a7dab9a9c6d7b7868974fba b4cf554c568813704993538008aed5b704624679 M block
:040000 040000 f2630c903cd36ede2619d173f9d1ea0d725ea111 ff6b6f732afbf6f4b6b26a827c463de50f0e356c M drivers

Has anyone seen a similar problem?
I can supply .config and other information if requested.

Arthur.

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