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

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Date:   Thu, 20 Jul 2017 15:22:25 +0200
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
To:     Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>,
        Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@...ove.sakura.ne.jp>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm, vmscan: do not loop on too_many_isolated for ever

On Wed 19-07-17 18:54:40, Hugh Dickins wrote:
[...]
> You probably won't welcome getting into alternatives at this late stage;
> but after hacking around it one way or another because of its pointless
> lockups, I lost patience with that too_many_isolated() loop a few months
> back (on realizing the enormous number of pages that may be isolated via
> migrate_pages(2)), and we've been running nicely since with something like:
> 
> 	bool got_mutex = false;
> 
> 	if (unlikely(too_many_isolated(pgdat, file, sc))) {
> 		if (mutex_lock_killable(&pgdat->too_many_isolated))
> 			return SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX;
> 		got_mutex = true;
> 	}
> 	...
> 	if (got_mutex)
> 		mutex_unlock(&pgdat->too_many_isolated);
> 
> Using a mutex to provide the intended throttling, without an infinite
> loop or an arbitrary delay; and without having to worry (as we often did)
> about whether those numbers in too_many_isolated() are really appropriate.
> No premature OOMs complained of yet.
> 
> But that was on a different kernel, and there I did have to make sure
> that PF_MEMALLOC always prevented us from nesting: I'm not certain of
> that in the current kernel (but do remember Johannes changing the memcg
> end to make it use PF_MEMALLOC too).  I offer the preview above, to see
> if you're interested in that alternative: if you are, then I'll go ahead
> and make it into an actual patch against v4.13-rc.

I would rather get rid of any additional locking here and my ultimate
goal is to make throttling at the page allocator layer rather than
inside the reclaim.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs