[PATCH] mm: stop kswapd's infinite loop at high order allocation

From: KOSAKI Motohiro
Date: Tue Dec 30 2008 - 05:56:01 EST



ok, wassim confirmed this patch works well.


==
From: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [PATCH] mm: kswapd stop infinite loop at high order allocation

Wassim Dagash reported following kswapd infinite loop problem.

kswapd runs in some infinite loop trying to swap until order 10 of zone
highmem is OK, While zone higmem (as I understand) has nothing to do
with contiguous memory (cause there is no 1-1 mapping) which means
kswapd will continue to try to balance order 10 of zone highmem
forever (or until someone release a very large chunk of highmem).

He proposed remove contenious checking on highmem at all.
However hugepage on highmem need contenious highmem page.

To add infinite loop stopper is simple and good.



Reported-by: wassim dagash <wassim.dagash@xxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/vmscan.c | 11 +++++++++++
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+)

Index: b/mm/vmscan.c
===================================================================
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -1872,6 +1872,17 @@ out:

try_to_freeze();

+ /*
+ * When highmem is very fragmented,
+ * alloc_pages(GFP_KERNEL, very-high-order) can cause
+ * infinite loop because zone_watermark_ok(highmem) failed.
+ * However, alloc_pages(GFP_KERNEL..) indicate highmem memory
+ * continuousness isn't necessary.
+ * Therefore we don't want contenious check at 2nd loop.
+ */
+ if (nr_reclaimed < SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX)
+ order = sc.order = 0;
+
goto loop_again;
}



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