linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] mm, vmscan: do not loop on too_many

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:   Thu, 9 Mar 2017 14:31:48 +0000
From:   Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@...ove.SAKURA.ne.jp>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm, vmscan: do not loop on too_many_isolated for ever

On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 02:30:57PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
> 
> Tetsuo Handa has reported [1][2] that direct reclaimers might get stuck
> in too_many_isolated loop basically for ever because the last few pages
> on the LRU lists are isolated by the kswapd which is stuck on fs locks
> when doing the pageout or slab reclaim. This in turn means that there is
> nobody to actually trigger the oom killer and the system is basically
> unusable.
> 
> too_many_isolated has been introduced by 35cd78156c49 ("vmscan: throttle
> direct reclaim when too many pages are isolated already") to prevent
> from pre-mature oom killer invocations because back then no reclaim
> progress could indeed trigger the OOM killer too early. But since the
> oom detection rework 0a0337e0d1d1 ("mm, oom: rework oom detection")
> the allocation/reclaim retry loop considers all the reclaimable pages
> and throttles the allocation at that layer so we can loosen the direct
> reclaim throttling.
> 
> Make shrink_inactive_list loop over too_many_isolated bounded and returns
> immediately when the situation hasn't resolved after the first sleep.
> Replace congestion_wait by a simple schedule_timeout_interruptible because
> we are not really waiting on the IO congestion in this path.
> 
> Please note that this patch can theoretically cause the OOM killer to
> trigger earlier while there are many pages isolated for the reclaim
> which makes progress only very slowly. This would be obvious from the oom
> report as the number of isolated pages are printed there. If we ever hit
> this should_reclaim_retry should consider those numbers in the evaluation
> in one way or another.
> 
> [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/201602092349.ACG81273.OSVtMJQHLOFOFF@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp
> [2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/201702212335.DJB30777.JOFMHSFtVLQOOF@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp
> 
> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs