vmscan: fix a livelock in kswapd

4746efde · Shaohua Li <[email protected]> · 2011-07-19 08:49:26 -07:00

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 ("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]>

Commit: 4746efded84d7c5a9c8d64d4c6e814ff0cf9fb42
Parents: f7b88631

Changes

1 files changed · +2 −1

File	Status	Add	Del	Content
mm/vmscan.c	modified	+2	−1	View file

mm/vmscan.c

View file

diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 5ed24b9..d036e59 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -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? */