[PATCH] mm: vmscan: disable kswapd on unreclaimable nodes

[Johannes Weiner]

Jia He reports a problem with kswapd spinning at 100% CPU when
requesting more hugepages than memory available in the system:

$ echo 4000 >/proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages

top - 13:42:59 up  3:37,  1 user,  load average: 1.09, 1.03, 1.01
Tasks:   1 total,   1 running,   0 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.0 us, 12.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 85.5 id,  2.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:  31371520 total, 30915136 used,   456384 free,      320 buffers
KiB Swap:  6284224 total,   115712 used,  6168512 free.    48192 cached Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
   76 root      20   0       0      0      0 R 100.0 0.000 217:17.29 kswapd3

At that time, there are no reclaimable pages left in the node, but as
kswapd fails to restore the high watermarks it refuses to go to sleep.

Kswapd needs to back away from nodes that fail to balance. Up until
1d82de618ddd ("mm, vmscan: make kswapd reclaim in terms of nodes")
kswapd had such a mechanism. It considered zones whose theoretically
reclaimable pages it had reclaimed six times over as unreclaimable and
backed away from them. This guard was erroneously removed as the patch
changed the definition of a balanced node.

However, simply restoring this code wouldn't help in the case reported
here: there *are* no reclaimable pages that could be scanned until the
threshold is met. Kswapd would stay awake anyway.

Introduce a new and much simpler way of backing off. If kswapd runs
through MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES (16) cycles without reclaiming a single
page, make it back off from the node. This is the same number of shots
direct reclaim takes before declaring OOM. Kswapd will go to sleep on
that node until a direct reclaimer manages to reclaim some pages, thus
proving the node reclaimable again.

Reported-by: Jia He <hejianet@xxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
---
 include/linux/mmzone.h |  2 ++
 include/linux/swap.h   |  1 +
 mm/page_alloc.c        |  6 ------
 mm/vmscan.c            | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
 4 files changed, 23 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/include/linux/mmzone.h b/include/linux/mmzone.h
index 8e02b3750fe0..d2c50ab6ae40 100644
--- a/include/linux/mmzone.h
+++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h
@@ -630,6 +630,8 @@ typedef struct pglist_data {
 	int kswapd_order;
 	enum zone_type kswapd_classzone_idx;
 
+	int kswapd_failures;		/* Number of 'reclaimed == 0' runs */
+
 #ifdef CONFIG_COMPACTION
 	int kcompactd_max_order;
 	enum zone_type kcompactd_classzone_idx;
diff --git a/include/linux/swap.h b/include/linux/swap.h
index 45e91dd6716d..5c06581a730b 100644
--- a/include/linux/swap.h
+++ b/include/linux/swap.h
@@ -288,6 +288,7 @@ extern void lru_cache_add_active_or_unevictable(struct page *page,
 						struct vm_area_struct *vma);
 
 /* linux/mm/vmscan.c */
+#define MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES 16
 extern unsigned long zone_reclaimable_pages(struct zone *zone);
 extern unsigned long pgdat_reclaimable_pages(struct pglist_data *pgdat);
 extern unsigned long try_to_free_pages(struct zonelist *zonelist, int order,
diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 614cd0397ce3..83f0442f07fa 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -3516,12 +3516,6 @@ bool gfp_pfmemalloc_allowed(gfp_t gfp_mask)
 }
 
 /*
- * Maximum number of reclaim retries without any progress before OOM killer
- * is consider as the only way to move forward.
- */
-#define MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES 16
-
-/*
  * Checks whether it makes sense to retry the reclaim to make a forward progress
  * for the given allocation request.
  * The reclaim feedback represented by did_some_progress (any progress during
diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 26c3b405ef34..8e9bdd172182 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -2626,6 +2626,15 @@ static bool shrink_node(pg_data_t *pgdat, struct scan_control *sc)
 	} while (should_continue_reclaim(pgdat, sc->nr_reclaimed - nr_reclaimed,
 					 sc->nr_scanned - nr_scanned, sc));
 
+	/*
+	 * Kswapd gives up on balancing particular nodes after too
+	 * many failures to reclaim anything from them. If reclaim
+	 * progress happens, reset the failure counter. A successful
+	 * direct reclaim run will knock a stuck kswapd loose again.
+	 */
+	if (reclaimable)
+		pgdat->kswapd_failures = 0;
+
 	return reclaimable;
 }
 
@@ -3134,6 +3143,10 @@ static bool prepare_kswapd_sleep(pg_data_t *pgdat, int order, int classzone_idx)
 	if (waitqueue_active(&pgdat->pfmemalloc_wait))
 		wake_up_all(&pgdat->pfmemalloc_wait);
 
+	/* Hopeless node, leave it to direct reclaim */
+	if (pgdat->kswapd_failures >= MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES)
+		return true;
+
 	for (i = 0; i <= classzone_idx; i++) {
 		struct zone *zone = pgdat->node_zones + i;
 
@@ -3316,6 +3329,9 @@ static int balance_pgdat(pg_data_t *pgdat, int order, int classzone_idx)
 			sc.priority--;
 	} while (sc.priority >= 1);
 
+	if (!sc.nr_reclaimed)
+		pgdat->kswapd_failures++;
+
 out:
 	/*
 	 * Return the order kswapd stopped reclaiming at as
@@ -3515,6 +3531,10 @@ void wakeup_kswapd(struct zone *zone, int order, enum zone_type classzone_idx)
 	if (!waitqueue_active(&pgdat->kswapd_wait))
 		return;
 
+	/* Hopeless node, leave it to direct reclaim */
+	if (pgdat->kswapd_failures >= MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES)
+		return;
+
 	/* Only wake kswapd if all zones are unbalanced */
 	for (z = 0; z <= classzone_idx; z++) {
 		zone = pgdat->node_zones + z;
-- 
2.11.1