Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm, memory_hotplug: do not fail offlining too early

[Vlastimil Babka]

On 09/13/2017 02:14 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>>> Do you think that the changelog should be more clear about this?
>>>
>>> It certainly wouldn't hurt :)
>>
>> So what do you think about the following wording:
> 
> Ups, wrong patch
> 
> 
> From 8639496a834b4a7c24972ec23b17e50f0d6a304c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
> Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2017 10:46:12 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH 1/2] mm, memory_hotplug: do not fail offlining too early
> 
> Memory offlining can fail just too eagerly under a heavy memory pressure.
> 
> [ 5410.336792] page:ffffea22a646bd00 count:255 mapcount:252 mapping:ffff88ff926c9f38 index:0x3
> [ 5410.336809] flags: 0x9855fe40010048(uptodate|active|mappedtodisk)
> [ 5410.336811] page dumped because: isolation failed
> [ 5410.336813] page->mem_cgroup:ffff8801cd662000
> [ 5420.655030] memory offlining [mem 0x18b580000000-0x18b5ffffffff] failed
> 
> Isolation has failed here because the page is not on LRU. Most probably
> because it was on the pcp LRU cache or it has been removed from the LRU
> already but it hasn't been freed yet. In both cases the page doesn't look
> non-migrable so retrying more makes sense.
> 
> __offline_pages seems rather cluttered when it comes to the retry
> logic. We have 5 retries at maximum and a timeout. We could argue
> whether the timeout makes sense but failing just because of a race when
> somebody isoltes a page from LRU or puts it on a pcp LRU lists is just
> wrong. It only takes it to race with a process which unmaps some pages
> and remove them from the LRU list and we can fail the whole offline
> because of something that is a temporary condition and actually not
> harmful for the offline.
> 
> Please note that unmovable pages should be already excluded during
> start_isolate_page_range. We could argue that has_unmovable_pages is
> racy and MIGRATE_MOVABLE check doesn't provide any hard guarantee either
> but kernel zones (aka < ZONE_MOVABLE) will very likely detect unmovable
> pages in most cases and movable zone shouldn't contain unmovable pages
> at all. Some of those pages might be pinned but not for ever because
> that would be a bug on its own. In any case the context is still
> interruptible and so the userspace can easily bail out when the
> operation takes too long. This is certainly better behavior than a
> hardcoded retry loop which is racy.
> 
> Fix this by removing the max retry count and only rely on the timeout
> resp. interruption by a signal from the userspace. Also retry rather
> than fail when check_pages_isolated sees some !free pages because those
> could be a result of the race as well.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>

Yeah, that's better, thanks.

Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>