Date:   Mon, 15 May 2017 14:57:13 +0200
From:   Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@...ibm.com>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
Cc:     linux-mm@...ck.org,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: mm: page allocation failures in swap_duplicate ->
 add_swap_count_continuation

On 05/15/2017 02:51 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Mon 15-05-17 10:10:17, Christian Borntraeger wrote:
>> On 05/15/2017 10:03 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>> On Fri 12-05-17 11:18:42, Christian Borntraeger wrote:
>>>> Folks,
>>>>
>>>> recently I have seen page allocation failures during
>>>> paging in the paging code:
>>>> e.g. 
>>>>
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel: Call Trace:
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel: ([<0000000000112f62>] show_trace+0x62/0x78)
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<0000000000113050>] show_stack+0x68/0xe0 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000004fb97e>] dump_stack+0x7e/0xb0 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<0000000000299262>] warn_alloc+0xf2/0x190 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<000000000029a25a>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0xeda/0xfe0 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002fa570>] alloc_pages_current+0xb8/0x170 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002f03fc>] add_swap_count_continuation+0x3c/0x280 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002f068c>] swap_duplicate+0x4c/0x80 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002dfbfa>] try_to_unmap_one+0x372/0x578 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<000000000030131a>] rmap_walk_ksm+0x14a/0x1d8 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002e0d60>] try_to_unmap+0x140/0x170 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002abc9c>] shrink_page_list+0x944/0xad8 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002ac720>] shrink_inactive_list+0x1e0/0x5b8 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002ad642>] shrink_node_memcg+0x5e2/0x800 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002ad954>] shrink_node+0xf4/0x360 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000002aeb00>] kswapd+0x330/0x810 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<0000000000189f14>] kthread+0x144/0x168 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000008011ea>] kernel_thread_starter+0x6/0xc 
>>>> May 05 21:36:53  kernel:  [<00000000008011e4>] kernel_thread_starter+0x0/0xc 
>>>>
>>>> This seems to be new in 4.11 but the relevant code did not seem to have
>>>> changed.
>>>>
>>>> Something like this 
>>>>
>>>> diff --git a/mm/swapfile.c b/mm/swapfile.c
>>>> index 1781308..b2dd53e 100644
>>>> --- a/mm/swapfile.c
>>>> +++ b/mm/swapfile.c
>>>> @@ -3039,7 +3039,7 @@ int swap_duplicate(swp_entry_t entry)
>>>>         int err = 0;
>>>>  
>>>>         while (!err && __swap_duplicate(entry, 1) == -ENOMEM)
>>>> -               err = add_swap_count_continuation(entry, GFP_ATOMIC);
>>>> +               err = add_swap_count_continuation(entry, GFP_ATOMIC | __GFP_NOWARN);
>>>>         return err;
>>>>  }
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>> seems not appropriate, because this code does not know if the caller can
>>>> handle returned errors.
>>>>
>>>> Would something like the following (white space damaged cut'n'paste be ok?
>>>> (the try_to_unmap_one change looks fine, not sure if copy_one_pte does the
>>>> right thing)
>>>
>>> No, it won't. If you want to silent the warning then explain _why_ it is
>>> a good approach. It is not immediatelly clear to me.
>>
>> Consider my mail a bug report, not a proper fix. As far as I can tell, try_to_unmap_one
>> can handle allocation failure gracefully, so not warn here _looks_ fine to me.
> 
> Could you be more specific about the issue then? I haven't checked very
> closely but AFAIR we just keep pages on the LRU if try_to_unmap fails
> and keep reclaiming. So we can handle the failure but it would be good
> to know that something like that happened because if this is not a
> one-off issue then it will help us to see why we see a seemingly
> spurious OOM.

My understanding is that we want to suppress these allocation failure messages
when
a: the allocation can fail (e.g. GFP_ATOMIC)
b: the caller can handle the allocation failure
to avoid spamming the logs. 

If you think that seeing this message under memory pressure is ok, because it will help
debugging, then so be it.
You might be actually right, because this message shows that we might do an allocation
to handle memory pressure. 

> 
>>>> diff --git a/mm/memory.c b/mm/memory.c
>>>> index 235ba51..3ae6f33 100644
>>>> --- a/mm/memory.c
>>>> +++ b/mm/memory.c
>>>> @@ -898,7 +898,7 @@ copy_one_pte(struct mm_struct *dst_mm, struct mm_struct *src_mm,
>>>>                 swp_entry_t entry = pte_to_swp_entry(pte);
>>>>  
>>>>                 if (likely(!non_swap_entry(entry))) {
>>>> -                       if (swap_duplicate(entry) < 0)
>>>> +                       if (swap_duplicate(entry, __GFP_NOWARN) < 0)
>>>>                                 return entry.val;
>>
>> This code has special casing for the allocation failure path, but I cannot
>> decide if it does the right thing here.
> 
> My point was that you should _always_ use the full gfp mask when taken
> as a parameter so the above should be GFP_ATOMIC | __GFP_NOWARN...
> 

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