[PATCH] mm: Make swapoff interruptible when unusing mms/shmem
From: Chris Down
Date: Wed Sep 30 2026 - 19:18:08 EST
try_to_unuse() only checks for a pending signal between mms, and
shmem_unuse() doesn't check at all. That means that once swapoff gets to
a process or a shmem file with a lot swapped out, nothing can interrupt
it until every last page of it has been read back in.
Just as one example of where this can concretely show up, freezing tasks
for suspend or hibernation has to wait for swapoff to notice the
freezer's fake signal, and gives up after freeze_timeout_msecs (20
seconds by default).
Here's a facetious example where one swaps out 2GiB of one process to a
swap file on ext4, starts swapoff, and half a second later tries to
freeze with pm_test=freezer. Writing to /sys/power/state then fails with
EBUSY and this in dmesg:
Freezing user space processes failed after 20.003 seconds (1 tasks refusing to freeze, wq_busy=0):
task:swapoff state:D stack:0 pid:3175 tgid:3175 ppid:2955 task_flags:0x400100 flags:0x00000419
Call trace:
[...]
io_schedule+0x44/0x70
folio_wait_bit_common+0x1ec/0x3d0
__folio_lock+0x24/0x40
unuse_pte_range+0x2d0/0x348
unuse_vma+0x158/0x248
unuse_mm+0xfc/0x150
try_to_unuse+0x104/0x3f8
__do_sys_swapoff+0x220/0x5d8
[...]
The same goes for anything else that wants swapoff to stop, like an
admin hitting ^C in a panic, of course.
Prior to commit b56a2d8af914 ("mm: rid swapoff of quadratic complexity")
try_to_unuse() was driven by find_next_to_unuse() which checks for a
signal before every entry, so let's restore that behaviour.
Just as an example of the improvements, here's how long freezing takes
in the same test while swapoff is happening on my computer:
before after
400MiB anon 8.925s 0.028s
400MiB shmem 1.639s 0.003s
2GiB anon failed after 20.003s 0.011s
Fixes: b56a2d8af914 ("mm: rid swapoff of quadratic complexity")
Signed-off-by: Chris Down <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/shmem.c | 4 ++++
mm/swapfile.c | 2 ++
2 files changed, 6 insertions(+)
diff --git a/mm/shmem.c b/mm/shmem.c
index ae08cff4500c..72c8a61db76f 100644
--- a/mm/shmem.c
+++ b/mm/shmem.c
@@ -1742,6 +1742,10 @@ static int shmem_unuse_inode(struct inode *inode, unsigned int type)
if (ret < 0)
break;
+ if (signal_pending(current)) {
+ ret = -EINTR;
+ break;
+ }
start = indices[folio_batch_count(&fbatch) - 1];
} while (true);
diff --git a/mm/swapfile.c b/mm/swapfile.c
index 254ce86fa923..c3288910b3e3 100644
--- a/mm/swapfile.c
+++ b/mm/swapfile.c
@@ -2689,6 +2689,8 @@ static inline int unuse_pmd_range(struct vm_area_struct *vma, pud_t *pud,
pmd = pmd_offset(pud, addr);
do {
cond_resched();
+ if (signal_pending(current))
+ return -EINTR;
next = pmd_addr_end(addr, end);
ret = unuse_pte_range(vma, pmd, addr, next, type);
if (ret)
base-commit: 2ddb90ee544ae97215afc4698dc223293997cc43
--
2.50.1