Re: [PATCH] squashfs: enable __GFP_FS in ->readpage to prevent hang in mem alloc

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Mon Dec 17 2018 - 09:49:13 EST


On Mon 17-12-18 06:41:01, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 03:10:44PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Mon 17-12-18 04:25:46, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > It's worth noticing that squashfs _is_ in fact holding a page locked in
> > > squashfs_copy_cache() when it calls grab_cache_page_nowait(). I'm not
> > > sure if this will lead to trouble or not because I'm insufficiently
> > > familiar with the reclaim path.
> >
> > Hmm, this is more interesting then. If there is any memcg accounted
> > allocation down that path _and_ the squashfs writeout can lock more
> > pages and mark them writeback before they are really sent to the storage
> > then we have a problem. See [1]
> >
> > [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181213092221.27270-1-mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx
>
> Squashfs is read only, so it'll never have dirty pages and never do
> writeout.
>
> But ... maybe the GFP flags being used for grab_cache_page_nowait() are
> wrong. It does, after all, say "nowait". Perhaps it shouldn't be trying
> direct reclaim at all, but rather fail earlier. Like this:
>
> +++ b/mm/filemap.c
> @@ -1550,6 +1550,8 @@ struct page *pagecache_get_page(struct address_space *mapping, pgoff_t offset,
> gfp_mask |= __GFP_WRITE;
> if (fgp_flags & FGP_NOFS)
> gfp_mask &= ~__GFP_FS;
> + if (fgp_flags & FGP_NOWAIT)
> + gfp_mask &= ~__GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM;
>
> page = __page_cache_alloc(gfp_mask);
> if (!page)

Isn't FGP_NOWAIT about page lock rather than the allocation context?

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs