[PATCH v3] mm, memcg: fix reclaim deadlock with writeback

[Michal Hocko]

From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>

Liu Bo has experienced a deadlock between memcg (legacy) reclaim and the
ext4 writeback
task1:
[<ffffffff811aaa52>] wait_on_page_bit+0x82/0xa0
[<ffffffff811c5777>] shrink_page_list+0x907/0x960
[<ffffffff811c6027>] shrink_inactive_list+0x2c7/0x680
[<ffffffff811c6ba4>] shrink_node_memcg+0x404/0x830
[<ffffffff811c70a8>] shrink_node+0xd8/0x300
[<ffffffff811c73dd>] do_try_to_free_pages+0x10d/0x330
[<ffffffff811c7865>] try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages+0xd5/0x1b0
[<ffffffff8122df2d>] try_charge+0x14d/0x720
[<ffffffff812320cc>] memcg_kmem_charge_memcg+0x3c/0xa0
[<ffffffff812321ae>] memcg_kmem_charge+0x7e/0xd0
[<ffffffff811b68a8>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x178/0x260
[<ffffffff8120bff5>] alloc_pages_current+0x95/0x140
[<ffffffff81074247>] pte_alloc_one+0x17/0x40
[<ffffffff811e34de>] __pte_alloc+0x1e/0x110
[<ffffffffa06739de>] alloc_set_pte+0x5fe/0xc20
[<ffffffff811e5d93>] do_fault+0x103/0x970
[<ffffffff811e6e5e>] handle_mm_fault+0x61e/0xd10
[<ffffffff8106ea02>] __do_page_fault+0x252/0x4d0
[<ffffffff8106ecb0>] do_page_fault+0x30/0x80
[<ffffffff8171bce8>] page_fault+0x28/0x30
[<ffffffffffffffff>] 0xffffffffffffffff

task2:
[<ffffffff811aadc6>] __lock_page+0x86/0xa0
[<ffffffffa02f1e47>] mpage_prepare_extent_to_map+0x2e7/0x310 [ext4]
[<ffffffffa08a2689>] ext4_writepages+0x479/0xd60
[<ffffffff811bbede>] do_writepages+0x1e/0x30
[<ffffffff812725e5>] __writeback_single_inode+0x45/0x320
[<ffffffff81272de2>] writeback_sb_inodes+0x272/0x600
[<ffffffff81273202>] __writeback_inodes_wb+0x92/0xc0
[<ffffffff81273568>] wb_writeback+0x268/0x300
[<ffffffff81273d24>] wb_workfn+0xb4/0x390
[<ffffffff810a2f19>] process_one_work+0x189/0x420
[<ffffffff810a31fe>] worker_thread+0x4e/0x4b0
[<ffffffff810a9786>] kthread+0xe6/0x100
[<ffffffff8171a9a1>] ret_from_fork+0x41/0x50
[<ffffffffffffffff>] 0xffffffffffffffff

He adds
: task1 is waiting for the PageWriteback bit of the page that task2 has
: collected in mpd->io_submit->io_bio, and tasks2 is waiting for the LOCKED
: bit the page which tasks1 has locked.

More precisely task1 is handling a page fault and it has a page locked
while it charges a new page table to a memcg. That in turn hits a memory
limit reclaim and the memcg reclaim for legacy controller is waiting on
the writeback but that is never going to finish because the writeback
itself is waiting for the page locked in the #PF path. So this is
essentially ABBA deadlock:
                                        lock_page(A)
                                        SetPageWriteback(A)
                                        unlock_page(A)
lock_page(B)
                                        lock_page(B)
pte_alloc_pne
  shrink_page_list
    wait_on_page_writeback(A)
                                        SetPageWriteback(B)
                                        unlock_page(B)

                                        # flush A, B to clear the writeback

This accumulating of more pages to flush is used by several filesystems
to generate a more optimal IO patterns.

Waiting for the writeback in legacy memcg controller is a workaround
for pre-mature OOM killer invocations because there is no dirty IO
throttling available for the controller. There is no easy way around
that unfortunately. Therefore fix this specific issue by pre-allocating
the page table outside of the page lock. We have that handy
infrastructure for that already so simply reuse the fault-around pattern
which already does this.

There are probably other hidden __GFP_ACCOUNT | GFP_KERNEL allocations
from under a fs page locked but they should be really rare. I am not
aware of a better solution unfortunately.

Reported-and-Debugged-by: Liu Bo <bo.liu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: stable
Fixes: c3b94f44fcb0 ("memcg: further prevent OOM with too many dirty pages")
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
---
 mm/memory.c | 11 +++++++++++
 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/memory.c b/mm/memory.c
index 4ad2d293ddc2..bb78e90a9b70 100644
--- a/mm/memory.c
+++ b/mm/memory.c
@@ -2993,6 +2993,17 @@ static vm_fault_t __do_fault(struct vm_fault *vmf)
 	struct vm_area_struct *vma = vmf->vma;
 	vm_fault_t ret;
 
+	/*
+	 * Preallocate pte before we take page_lock because this might lead to
+	 * deadlocks for memcg reclaim which waits for pages under writeback.
+	 */
+	if (pmd_none(*vmf->pmd) && !vmf->prealloc_pte) {
+		vmf->prealloc_pte = pte_alloc_one(vmf->vma->vm_mm, vmf->address);
+		if (!vmf->prealloc_pte)
+			return VM_FAULT_OOM;
+		smp_wmb(); /* See comment in __pte_alloc() */
+	}
+
 	ret = vma->vm_ops->fault(vmf);
 	if (unlikely(ret & (VM_FAULT_ERROR | VM_FAULT_NOPAGE | VM_FAULT_RETRY |
 			    VM_FAULT_DONE_COW)))
-- 
2.19.2