Re: [RFC PATCH 1/2] mm, vmscan: account the number of isolated pages per zone

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Wed Jan 25 2017 - 08:00:29 EST


On Wed 25-01-17 20:09:31, Tetsuo Handa wrote:
> Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Wed 25-01-17 11:19:57, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 11:15:17AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > > I think we are missing a check for fatal_signal_pending in
> > > > iomap_file_buffered_write. This means that an oom victim can consume the
> > > > full memory reserves. What do you think about the following? I haven't
> > > > tested this but it mimics generic_perform_write so I guess it should
> > > > work.
> > >
> > > Hi Michal,
> > >
> > > this looks reasonable to me. But we have a few more such loops,
> > > maybe it makes sense to move the check into iomap_apply?
> >
> > I wasn't sure about the expected semantic of iomap_apply but now that
> > I've actually checked all the callers I believe all of them should be
> > able to handle EINTR just fine. Well iomap_file_dirty, iomap_zero_range,
> > iomap_fiemap and iomap_page_mkwriteseem do not follow the standard
> > pattern to return the number of written pages or an error but it rather
> > propagates the error out. From my limited understanding of those code
> > paths that should just be ok. I was not all that sure about iomap_dio_rw
> > that is just too convoluted for me. If that one is OK as well then
> > the following patch should be indeed better.
>
> Is "length" in
>
> written = actor(inode, pos, length, data, &iomap);
>
> call guaranteed to be small enough? If not guaranteed,
> don't we need to check SIGKILL inside "actor" functions?

You are right! Checking for signals inside iomap_apply doesn't really
solve anything because basically all users do iov_iter_count(). Blee. So
we have loops around iomap_apply which itself loops inside the actor.
iomap_write_begin seems to be used by most of them which is also where we
get the pagecache page so I guess this should be the "right" place to
put the check in. Things like dax_iomap_actor will need an explicit check.
This is quite unfortunate but I do not see any better solution.
What do you think Christoph?
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