Re: [PATCH 1/9] mm: fix 100% CPU kswapd busyloop on unreclaimable nodes

[Hillf Danton]

On March 01, 2017 5:40 AM Johannes Weiner wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
> v2: move MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES to mm/internal.h (Michal)
> 
> Reported-by: Jia He <hejianet@xxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Tested-by: Jia He <hejianet@xxxxxxxxx>
> Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
> ---

Acked-by: Hillf Danton <hillf.zj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>