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vmscan: fix a livelock in kswapd
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I'm running a workload which triggers a lot of swap in a machine with 4
nodes.  After I kill the workload, I found a kswapd livelock.  Sometimes
kswapd3 or kswapd2 are keeping running and I can't access filesystem,
but most memory is free.

This looks like a regression since commit 08951e5 ("mm: vmscan:
correct check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely").

Node 2 and 3 have only ZONE_NORMAL, but balance_pgdat() will return 0
for classzone_idx.  The reason is end_zone in balance_pgdat() is 0 by
default, if all zones have watermark ok, end_zone will keep 0.

Later sleeping_prematurely() always returns true.  Because this is an
order 3 wakeup, and if classzone_idx is 0, both balanced_pages and
present_pages in pgdat_balanced() are 0.  We add a special case here.
If a zone has no page, we think it's balanced.  This fixes the livelock.

Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Cc: Minchan Kim <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
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Shaohua Li authored and torvalds committed Jul 20, 2011
1 parent f7b8863 commit 4746efd
Showing 1 changed file with 2 additions and 1 deletion.
3 changes: 2 additions & 1 deletion mm/vmscan.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -2310,7 +2310,8 @@ static bool pgdat_balanced(pg_data_t *pgdat, unsigned long balanced_pages,
for (i = 0; i <= classzone_idx; i++)
present_pages += pgdat->node_zones[i].present_pages;

return balanced_pages > (present_pages >> 2);
/* A special case here: if zone has no page, we think it's balanced */
return balanced_pages >= (present_pages >> 2);
}

/* is kswapd sleeping prematurely? */
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