linux-ext4 - Re: Lockup in wait_transaction_locked under memory pressure

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Date:	Wed, 1 Jul 2015 08:10:14 +0200
From:	Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.cz>
To:	Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
Cc:	Nikolay Borisov <kernel@...p.com>, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, Marian Marinov <mm@...com>
Subject: Re: Lockup in wait_transaction_locked under memory pressure

On Wed 01-07-15 08:58:51, Dave Chinner wrote:
[...]
> *blink*
> 
> /me re-reads again
> 
> That assumption is fundamentally broken. Filesystems use GFP_NOFS
> because the filesystem holds resources that can prevent memory
> reclaim making forwards progress if it re-enters the filesystem or
> blocks on anything filesystem related. memcg does not change that,
> and I'm kinda scared to learn that memcg plays fast and loose like
> this.
> 
> For example: IO completion might require unwritten extent conversion
> which executes filesystem transactions and GFP_NOFS allocations. The
> writeback flag on the pages can not be cleared until unwritten
> extent conversion completes. Hence memory reclaim cannot wait on
> page writeback to complete in GFP_NOFS context because it is not
> safe to do so, memcg reclaim or otherwise.

Thanks for the clarification.

> > really charge after set_page_writeback (called from ext4_bio_write_page)
> > and before the page is really submitted (when the bio is full or
> > explicitly via ext4_io_submit). I thought that io_submit_add_bh submits
> > the page but it doesn't do that necessarily.
> 
> XFS does exactly the same thing - the underlying alogrithm ext4 uses
> to build large bios efficiently was copied from XFS. And FWIW XFS has
> been using this algorithm since 2.6.15....

OK, I will mark the patch for stable then.

Thanks!
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
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