Re: [PATCH] mm, vmstat: Allow WQ concurrency to discover memory reclaim doesn't make any progress

[Michal Hocko]

Ping... Are there any concerns about this patch?

On Thu 19-11-15 13:30:53, Michal Hocko wrote:
> From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
> 
> Tetsuo Handa has reported that the system might basically livelock in OOM
> condition without triggering the OOM killer. The issue is caused by
> internal dependency of the direct reclaim on vmstat counter updates (via
> zone_reclaimable) which are performed from the workqueue context.
> If all the current workers get assigned to an allocation request,
> though, they will be looping inside the allocator trying to reclaim
> memory but zone_reclaimable can see stalled numbers so it will consider
> a zone reclaimable even though it has been scanned way too much. WQ
> concurrency logic will not consider this situation as a congested workqueue
> because it relies that worker would have to sleep in such a situation.
> This also means that it doesn't try to spawn new workers or invoke
> the rescuer thread if the one is assigned to the queue.
> 
> In order to fix this issue we need to do two things. First we have to
> let wq concurrency code know that we are in trouble so we have to do
> a short sleep. In order to prevent from issues handled by 0e093d99763e
> ("writeback: do not sleep on the congestion queue if there are no
> congested BDIs or if significant congestion is not being encountered in
> the current zone") we limit the sleep only to worker threads which are
> the ones of the interest anyway.
> 
> The second thing to do is to create a dedicated workqueue for vmstat and
> mark it WQ_MEM_RECLAIM to note it participates in the reclaim and to
> have a spare worker thread for it.
> 
> Reported-by: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: stable # 2.6.36+
> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
> ---
> [I am convinced that I have posted this as a separate patch but I cannot
> find it in the archive nor in my inbox, so let me try again.]
> 
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> The original issue reported by Tetsuo [1] has seen multiple attempts for
> a fix. The easiest one being [2] which was targeted to the particular
> problem. There was a more general concern that looping inside the
> allocator without ever sleeping breaks the basic assumption of worker
> concurrency logic so the fix should be more general. Another attempt [3]
> therefore added a short (1 jiffy) sleep into the page allocator. This
> would, however, introduce sleeping for all callers of the page allocator
> which is not really needed. This patch tries to be a compromise and
> introduce sleeping only where it matters - for kworkers.
> 
> Even though we haven't seen bug reports in the past I would suggest
> backporting this to the stable trees. The issue is present since we have
> stopped useing congestion_wait in the retry loop because WQ concurrency
> is older as well as vmstat worqueue based refresh AFAICS.
> 
> [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/201510130025.EJF21331.FFOQJtVOMLFHSO%40I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp
> [2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/201510212126.JIF90648.HOOFJVFQLMStOF@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [3] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/201510251952.CEF04109.OSOtLFHFVFJMQO@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
>  mm/backing-dev.c | 19 ++++++++++++++++---
>  mm/vmstat.c      |  6 ++++--
>  2 files changed, 20 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/mm/backing-dev.c b/mm/backing-dev.c
> index 8ed2ffd963c5..7340353f8aea 100644
> --- a/mm/backing-dev.c
> +++ b/mm/backing-dev.c
> @@ -957,8 +957,9 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL(congestion_wait);
>   * jiffies for either a BDI to exit congestion of the given @sync queue
>   * or a write to complete.
>   *
> - * In the absence of zone congestion, cond_resched() is called to yield
> - * the processor if necessary but otherwise does not sleep.
> + * In the absence of zone congestion, a short sleep or a cond_resched is
> + * performed to yield the processor and to allow other subsystems to make
> + * a forward progress.
>   *
>   * The return value is 0 if the sleep is for the full timeout. Otherwise,
>   * it is the number of jiffies that were still remaining when the function
> @@ -978,7 +979,19 @@ long wait_iff_congested(struct zone *zone, int sync, long timeout)
>  	 */
>  	if (atomic_read(&nr_wb_congested[sync]) == 0 ||
>  	    !test_bit(ZONE_CONGESTED, &zone->flags)) {
> -		cond_resched();
> +
> +		/*
> +		 * Memory allocation/reclaim might be called from a WQ
> +		 * context and the current implementation of the WQ
> +		 * concurrency control doesn't recognize that a particular
> +		 * WQ is congested if the worker thread is looping without
> +		 * ever sleeping. Therefore we have to do a short sleep
> +		 * here rather than calling cond_resched().
> +		 */
> +		if (current->flags & PF_WQ_WORKER)
> +			schedule_timeout(1);
> +		else
> +			cond_resched();
>  
>  		/* In case we scheduled, work out time remaining */
>  		ret = timeout - (jiffies - start);
> diff --git a/mm/vmstat.c b/mm/vmstat.c
> index 45dcbcb5c594..0975da8e3432 100644
> --- a/mm/vmstat.c
> +++ b/mm/vmstat.c
> @@ -1381,6 +1381,7 @@ static const struct file_operations proc_vmstat_file_operations = {
>  #endif /* CONFIG_PROC_FS */
>  
>  #ifdef CONFIG_SMP
> +static struct workqueue_struct *vmstat_wq;
>  static DEFINE_PER_CPU(struct delayed_work, vmstat_work);
>  int sysctl_stat_interval __read_mostly = HZ;
>  static cpumask_var_t cpu_stat_off;
> @@ -1393,7 +1394,7 @@ static void vmstat_update(struct work_struct *w)
>  		 * to occur in the future. Keep on running the
>  		 * update worker thread.
>  		 */
> -		schedule_delayed_work_on(smp_processor_id(),
> +		queue_delayed_work_on(smp_processor_id(), vmstat_wq,
>  			this_cpu_ptr(&vmstat_work),
>  			round_jiffies_relative(sysctl_stat_interval));
>  	} else {
> @@ -1462,7 +1463,7 @@ static void vmstat_shepherd(struct work_struct *w)
>  		if (need_update(cpu) &&
>  			cpumask_test_and_clear_cpu(cpu, cpu_stat_off))
>  
> -			schedule_delayed_work_on(cpu,
> +			queue_delayed_work_on(cpu, vmstat_wq,
>  				&per_cpu(vmstat_work, cpu), 0);
>  
>  	put_online_cpus();
> @@ -1551,6 +1552,7 @@ static int __init setup_vmstat(void)
>  
>  	start_shepherd_timer();
>  	cpu_notifier_register_done();
> +	vmstat_wq = alloc_workqueue("vmstat", WQ_FREEZABLE|WQ_MEM_RECLAIM, 0);
>  #endif
>  #ifdef CONFIG_PROC_FS
>  	proc_create("buddyinfo", S_IRUGO, NULL, &fragmentation_file_operations);
> -- 
> 2.6.2
> 

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
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