https://github.com/torvalds/linux
Revision 84235de394d9775bfaa7fa9762a59d91fef0c1fc authored by Johannes Weiner on 16 October 2013, 20:47:00 UTC, committed by Linus Torvalds on 17 October 2013, 04:35:53 UTC
Buffer allocation has a very crude indefinite loop around waking the
flusher threads and performing global NOFS direct reclaim because it can
not handle allocation failures.

The most immediate problem with this is that the allocation may fail due
to a memory cgroup limit, where flushers + direct reclaim might not make
any progress towards resolving the situation at all.  Because unlike the
global case, a memory cgroup may not have any cache at all, only
anonymous pages but no swap.  This situation will lead to a reclaim
livelock with insane IO from waking the flushers and thrashing unrelated
filesystem cache in a tight loop.

Use __GFP_NOFAIL allocations for buffers for now.  This makes sure that
any looping happens in the page allocator, which knows how to
orchestrate kswapd, direct reclaim, and the flushers sensibly.  It also
allows memory cgroups to detect allocations that can't handle failure
and will allow them to ultimately bypass the limit if reclaim can not
make progress.

Reported-by: azurIt <azurit@pobox.sk>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 parent 4942642
History
Tip revision: 84235de394d9775bfaa7fa9762a59d91fef0c1fc authored by Johannes Weiner on 16 October 2013, 20:47:00 UTC
fs: buffer: move allocation failure loop into the allocator
Tip revision: 84235de
File Mode Size
Documentation
arch
block
crypto
drivers
firmware
fs
include
init
ipc
kernel
lib
mm
net
samples
scripts
security
sound
tools
usr
virt
.gitignore -rw-r--r-- 1.1 KB
.mailmap -rw-r--r-- 4.4 KB
COPYING -rw-r--r-- 18.3 KB
CREDITS -rw-r--r-- 93.0 KB
Kbuild -rw-r--r-- 2.5 KB
Kconfig -rw-r--r-- 252 bytes
MAINTAINERS -rw-r--r-- 257.6 KB
Makefile -rw-r--r-- 47.4 KB
README -rw-r--r-- 18.3 KB
REPORTING-BUGS -rw-r--r-- 7.3 KB

README

back to top