Re: [PATCH v3 00/25] Large pages in the page cache

[Kirill A. Shutemov]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 06:40:02PM +0300, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 06:36:32AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > From: "Matthew Wilcox (Oracle)" <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > 
> > This patch set does not pass xfstests.  Test at your own risk.  It is
> > based on the readahead rewrite which is in Andrew's tree.  The large
> > pages somehow manage to fall off the LRU, so the test VM quickly runs
> > out of memory and freezes.  To reproduce:
> > 
> > # mkfs.xfs /dev/sdb && mount /dev/sdb /mnt && dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=2048 of=/mnt/bigfile && sync && sleep 2 && sync && echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches 
> > # /host/home/willy/kernel/xarray-2/tools/vm/page-types | grep thp
> > 0x0000000000401800	       511        1  ___________Ma_________t____________________	mmap,anonymous,thp
> > 0x0000000000405868	         1        0  ___U_lA____Ma_b_______t____________________	uptodate,lru,active,mmap,anonymous,swapbacked,thp
> > # dd if=/mnt/bigfile of=/dev/null bs=2M count=5
> > # /host/home/willy/kernel/xarray-2/tools/vm/page-types | grep thp
> > 0x0000000000400000	      2516        9  ______________________t____________________	thp
> > 0x0000000000400028	         1        0  ___U_l________________t____________________	uptodate,lru,thp
> > 0x000000000040006c	       106        0  __RU_lA_______________t____________________	referenced,uptodate,lru,active,thp
> 
> Note that you have 107 pages on LRU. It is only head pages. With order-5
> pages it is over 13MiB.
> 
> Looks like everything is fine.

/proc/kpageflags reads page's flag bit directly instead of relying on
PageLRU:

	u |= kpf_copy_bit(k, KPF_LRU,		PG_lru);

Tail pages don't have this bit set. They rely on head page's flag for
PageLRU().

It would be nice to get it fixed, but I guess it is too late. Somebody may
rely on the current behaviour by now.

-- 
 Kirill A. Shutemov