Revision 72853e2991a2702ae93aaf889ac7db743a415dd3 authored by Mel Gorman on 09 September 2010, 23:38:16 UTC, committed by Linus Torvalds on 10 September 2010, 01:57:25 UTC
When allocating a page, the system uses NR_FREE_PAGES counters to
determine if watermarks would remain intact after the allocation was made.
This check is made without interrupts disabled or the zone lock held and
so is race-prone by nature.  Unfortunately, when pages are being freed in
batch, the counters are updated before the pages are added on the list.
During this window, the counters are misleading as the pages do not exist
yet.  When under significant pressure on systems with large numbers of
CPUs, it's possible for processes to make progress even though they should
have been stalled.  This is particularly problematic if a number of the
processes are using GFP_ATOMIC as the min watermark can be accidentally
breached and in extreme cases, the system can livelock.

This patch updates the counters after the pages have been added to the
list.  This makes the allocator more cautious with respect to preserving
the watermarks and mitigates livelock possibilities.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: avoid modifying incoming args]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 parent 5ee28a4
Raw File
argv_split.c
/*
 * Helper function for splitting a string into an argv-like array.
 */

#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/ctype.h>
#include <linux/string.h>
#include <linux/slab.h>
#include <linux/module.h>

static const char *skip_arg(const char *cp)
{
	while (*cp && !isspace(*cp))
		cp++;

	return cp;
}

static int count_argc(const char *str)
{
	int count = 0;

	while (*str) {
		str = skip_spaces(str);
		if (*str) {
			count++;
			str = skip_arg(str);
		}
	}

	return count;
}

/**
 * argv_free - free an argv
 * @argv - the argument vector to be freed
 *
 * Frees an argv and the strings it points to.
 */
void argv_free(char **argv)
{
	char **p;
	for (p = argv; *p; p++)
		kfree(*p);

	kfree(argv);
}
EXPORT_SYMBOL(argv_free);

/**
 * argv_split - split a string at whitespace, returning an argv
 * @gfp: the GFP mask used to allocate memory
 * @str: the string to be split
 * @argcp: returned argument count
 *
 * Returns an array of pointers to strings which are split out from
 * @str.  This is performed by strictly splitting on white-space; no
 * quote processing is performed.  Multiple whitespace characters are
 * considered to be a single argument separator.  The returned array
 * is always NULL-terminated.  Returns NULL on memory allocation
 * failure.
 */
char **argv_split(gfp_t gfp, const char *str, int *argcp)
{
	int argc = count_argc(str);
	char **argv = kzalloc(sizeof(*argv) * (argc+1), gfp);
	char **argvp;

	if (argv == NULL)
		goto out;

	if (argcp)
		*argcp = argc;

	argvp = argv;

	while (*str) {
		str = skip_spaces(str);

		if (*str) {
			const char *p = str;
			char *t;

			str = skip_arg(str);

			t = kstrndup(p, str-p, gfp);
			if (t == NULL)
				goto fail;
			*argvp++ = t;
		}
	}
	*argvp = NULL;

  out:
	return argv;

  fail:
	argv_free(argv);
	return NULL;
}
EXPORT_SYMBOL(argv_split);
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