Revision c3b94f44fcb0725471ecebb701c077a0ed67bd07 authored by Hugh Dickins on 31 July 2012, 23:45:59 UTC, committed by Linus Torvalds on 01 August 2012, 01:42:49 UTC
The may_enter_fs test turns out to be too restrictive: though I saw no problem with it when testing on 3.5-rc6, it very soon OOMed when I tested on 3.5-rc6-mm1. I don't know what the difference there is, perhaps I just slightly changed the way I started off the testing: dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/temp bs=1M count=1024; rm -f /mnt/temp; sync repeatedly, in 20M memory.limit_in_bytes cgroup to ext4 on USB stick. ext4 (and gfs2 and xfs) turn out to allocate new pages for writing with AOP_FLAG_NOFS: that seems a little worrying, and it's unclear to me why the transaction needs to be started even before allocating pagecache memory. But it may not be worth worrying about these days: if direct reclaim avoids FS writeback, does __GFP_FS now mean anything? Anyway, we insisted on the may_enter_fs test to avoid hangs with the loop device; but since that also masks off __GFP_IO, we can test for __GFP_IO directly, ignoring may_enter_fs and __GFP_FS. But even so, the test still OOMs sometimes: when originally testing on 3.5-rc6, it OOMed about one time in five or ten; when testing just now on 3.5-rc6-mm1, it OOMed on the first iteration. This residual problem comes from an accumulation of pages under ordinary writeback, not marked PageReclaim, so rightly not causing the memcg check to wait on their writeback: these too can prevent shrink_page_list() from freeing any pages, so many times that memcg reclaim fails and OOMs. Deal with these in the same way as direct reclaim now deals with dirty FS pages: mark them PageReclaim. It is appropriate to rotate these to tail of list when writepage completes, but more importantly, the PageReclaim flag makes memcg reclaim wait on them if encountered again. Increment NR_VMSCAN_IMMEDIATE? That's arguable: I chose not. Setting PageReclaim here may occasionally race with end_page_writeback() clearing it: lru_deactivate_fn() already faced the same race, and correctly concluded that the window is small and the issue non-critical. With these changes, the test runs indefinitely without OOMing on ext4, ext3 and ext2: I'll move on to test with other filesystems later. Trivia: invert conditions for a clearer block without an else, and goto keep_locked to do the unlock_page. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujtisu.com> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com> Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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REPORTING-BUGS
[Some of this is taken from Frohwalt Egerer's original linux-kernel FAQ]
What follows is a suggested procedure for reporting Linux bugs. You
aren't obliged to use the bug reporting format, it is provided as a guide
to the kind of information that can be useful to developers - no more.
If the failure includes an "OOPS:" type message in your log or on
screen please read "Documentation/oops-tracing.txt" before posting your
bug report. This explains what you should do with the "Oops" information
to make it useful to the recipient.
Send the output to the maintainer of the kernel area that seems to
be involved with the problem, and cc the relevant mailing list. Don't
worry too much about getting the wrong person. If you are unsure send it
to the person responsible for the code relevant to what you were doing.
If it occurs repeatably try and describe how to recreate it. That is
worth even more than the oops itself. The list of maintainers and
mailing lists is in the MAINTAINERS file in this directory. If you
know the file name that causes the problem you can use the following
command in this directory to find some of the maintainers of that file:
perl scripts/get_maintainer.pl -f <filename>
If it is a security bug, please copy the Security Contact listed
in the MAINTAINERS file. They can help coordinate bugfix and disclosure.
See Documentation/SecurityBugs for more information.
If you are totally stumped as to whom to send the report, send it to
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org. (For more information on the linux-kernel
mailing list see http://www.tux.org/lkml/).
This is a suggested format for a bug report sent to the Linux kernel mailing
list. Having a standardized bug report form makes it easier for you not to
overlook things, and easier for the developers to find the pieces of
information they're really interested in. Don't feel you have to follow it.
First run the ver_linux script included as scripts/ver_linux, which
reports the version of some important subsystems. Run this script with
the command "sh scripts/ver_linux".
Use that information to fill in all fields of the bug report form, and
post it to the mailing list with a subject of "PROBLEM: <one line
summary from [1.]>" for easy identification by the developers.
[1.] One line summary of the problem:
[2.] Full description of the problem/report:
[3.] Keywords (i.e., modules, networking, kernel):
[4.] Kernel information
[4.1.] Kernel version (from /proc/version):
[4.2.] Kernel .config file:
[5.] Most recent kernel version which did not have the bug:
[6.] Output of Oops.. message (if applicable) with symbolic information
resolved (see Documentation/oops-tracing.txt)
[7.] A small shell script or example program which triggers the
problem (if possible)
[8.] Environment
[8.1.] Software (add the output of the ver_linux script here)
[8.2.] Processor information (from /proc/cpuinfo):
[8.3.] Module information (from /proc/modules):
[8.4.] Loaded driver and hardware information (/proc/ioports, /proc/iomem)
[8.5.] PCI information ('lspci -vvv' as root)
[8.6.] SCSI information (from /proc/scsi/scsi)
[8.7.] Other information that might be relevant to the problem
(please look in /proc and include all information that you
think to be relevant):
[X.] Other notes, patches, fixes, workarounds:
Thank you
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