Re: [PATCH]vmscan: fix a livelock in kswapd

From: Minchan Kim
Date: Wed Jul 20 2011 - 01:44:25 EST


On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 4:09 PM, Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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 08951e545918c159.
> 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 <shaohua.li@xxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@xxxxxxxxx>


--
Kind regards,
Minchan Kim
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