mm: fix 100% CPU kswapd busyloop on unreclaimable nodes
Patch series "mm: kswapd spinning on unreclaimable nodes - fixes and cleanups". Jia reported a scenario in which the kswapd of a node indefinitely spins at 100% CPU usage. We have seen similar cases at Facebook. The kernel's current method of judging its ability to reclaim a node (or whether to back off and sleep) is based on the amount of scanned pages in proportion to the amount of reclaimable pages. In Jia's and our scenarios, there are no reclaimable pages in the node, however, and the condition for backing off is never met. Kswapd busyloops in an attempt to restore the watermarks while having nothing to work with. This series reworks the definition of an unreclaimable node based not on scanning but on whether kswapd is able to actually reclaim pages in MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES (16) consecutive runs. This is the same criteria the page allocator uses for giving up on direct reclaim and invoking the OOM killer. If it cannot free any pages, kswapd will go to sleep and leave further attempts to direct reclaim invocations, which will either make progress and re-enable kswapd, or invoke the OOM killer. Patch #1 fixes the immediate problem Jia reported, the remainder are smaller fixlets, cleanups, and overall phasing out of the old method. Patch #6 is the odd one out. It's a nice cleanup to get_scan_count(), and directly related to #5, but in itself not relevant to the series. If the whole series is too ambitious for 4.11, I would consider the first three patches fixes, the rest cleanups. This patch (of 9): Jia He reports a problem with kswapd spinning at 100% CPU when requesting more hugepages than memory available in the system: $ echo 4000 >/proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages top - 13:42:59 up 3:37, 1 user, load average: 1.09, 1.03, 1.01 Tasks: 1 total, 1 running, 0 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie %Cpu(s): 0.0 us, 12.5 sy, 0.0 ni, 85.5 id, 2.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st KiB Mem: 31371520 total, 30915136 used, 456384 free, 320 buffers KiB Swap: 6284224 total, 115712 used, 6168512 free. 48192 cached Mem PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 76 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 100.0 0.000 217:17.29 kswapd3 At that time, there are no reclaimable pages left in the node, but as kswapd fails to restore the high watermarks it refuses to go to sleep. Kswapd needs to back away from nodes that fail to balance. Up until commit 1d82de61 ("mm, vmscan: make kswapd reclaim in terms of nodes") kswapd had such a mechanism. It considered zones whose theoretically reclaimable pages it had reclaimed six times over as unreclaimable and backed away from them. This guard was erroneously removed as the patch changed the definition of a balanced node. However, simply restoring this code wouldn't help in the case reported here: there *are* no reclaimable pages that could be scanned until the threshold is met. Kswapd would stay awake anyway. Introduce a new and much simpler way of backing off. If kswapd runs through MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES (16) cycles without reclaiming a single page, make it back off from the node. This is the same number of shots direct reclaim takes before declaring OOM. Kswapd will go to sleep on that node until a direct reclaimer manages to reclaim some pages, thus proving the node reclaimable again. [hannes@cmpxchg.org: check kswapd failure against the cumulative nr_reclaimed count] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170306162410.GB2090@cmpxchg.org [shakeelb@google.com: fix condition for throttle_direct_reclaim] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170314183228.20152-1-shakeelb@google.com Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170228214007.5621-2-hannes@cmpxchg.org Signed-off-by:Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Signed-off-by:
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