Date:	Fri, 15 Jul 2016 14:22:11 +0200
From:	Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
To:	Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@...hat.com>
Cc:	Ondrej Kozina <okozina@...hat.com>,
	Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@...hat.com>,
	Stanislav Kozina <skozina@...hat.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, dm-devel@...hat.com
Subject: Re: System freezes after OOM

On Fri 15-07-16 08:11:22, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Michal Hocko wrote:
> 
> > On Thu 14-07-16 13:35:35, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> > > On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > > On Thu 14-07-16 10:00:16, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> > > > > But it needs other changes to honor the PF_LESS_THROTTLE flag:
> > > > > 
> > > > > static int current_may_throttle(void)
> > > > > {
> > > > >         return !(current->flags & PF_LESS_THROTTLE) ||
> > > > >                 current->backing_dev_info == NULL ||
> > > > >                 bdi_write_congested(current->backing_dev_info);
> > > > > }
> > > > > --- if you set PF_LESS_THROTTLE, current_may_throttle may still return 
> > > > > true if one of the other conditions is met.
> > > > 
> > > > That is true but doesn't that mean that the device is congested and
> > > > waiting a bit is the right thing to do?
> > > 
> > > You shouldn't really throttle mempool allocations at all. It's better to 
> > > fail the allocation quickly and allocate from a mempool reserve than to 
> > > wait 0.1 seconds in the reclaim path.
> > 
> > Well, but we do that already, no? The first allocation request is NOWAIT
> 
> The stacktraces showed that the kcryptd process was throttled when it 
> tried to do mempool allocation. Mempool adds the __GFP_NORETRY flag to the 
> allocation, but unfortunatelly, this flag doesn't prevent the allocator 
> from throttling.

Yes and in fact it shouldn't prevent any throttling. The flag merely
says that the allocation should give up rather than retry
reclaim/compaction again and again.

> I say that the process doing mempool allocation shouldn't ever be 
> throttled. Maybe add __GFP_NOTHROTTLE?

A specific gfp flag would be an option but we are slowly running out of
bit space there and I am not yet convinced PF_LESS_THROTTLE is
unsuitable.

> > and then we try to consume an object from the pool. We are re-adding
> > __GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM in case both fail. The point of throttling is to
> > prevent from scanning through LRUs too quickly while we know that the
> > bdi is congested.
> 
> > > dm-crypt can do approximatelly 100MB/s. That means that it processes 25k 
> > > swap pages per second. If you wait in mempool_alloc, the allocation would 
> > > be satisfied in 0.00004s. If you wait in the allocator's throttle 
> > > function, you waste 0.1s.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > It is also questionable if those 0.1 second sleeps are reasonable at all. 
> > > SSDs with 100k IOPS are common - they can drain the request queue in much 
> > > less time than 0.1 second. I think those hardcoded 0.1 second sleeps 
> > > should be replaced with sleeps until the device stops being congested.
> > 
> > Well if we do not do throttle_vm_writeout then the only remaining
> > writeout throttling for PF_LESS_THROTTLE is wait_iff_congested for
> > the direct reclaim and that should wake up if the device stops being
> > congested AFAIU.
> 
> I mean - a proper thing is to use active wakeup for the throttling, rather 
> than retrying every 0.1 second. Polling for some condition is generally 
> bad idea.
> 
> If there are too many pages under writeback, you should sleep on a wait 
> queue. When the number of pages under writeback drops, wake up the wait 
> queue.

I might be missing something but exactly this is what happens in
wait_iff_congested no? If the bdi doesn't see the congestion it wakes up
the reclaim context even before the timeout. Or are we talking past each
other?

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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