linux-kernel - Re: kernel BUG at mm/page-writeback.c:LINE!

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Date:   Tue, 12 Jan 2021 09:35:34 -0800
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
Cc:     Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        syzbot <syzbot+2fc0712f8f8b8b8fa0ef@...kaller.appspotmail.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        syzkaller-bugs <syzkaller-bugs@...glegroups.com>
Subject: Re: kernel BUG at mm/page-writeback.c:LINE!

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 2:44 AM Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz> wrote:
>
> On Fri 08-01-21 18:04:21, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > Oh, and Michael Larabel (of phoronix) reports that that one-liner does
> > something bad to a few PostgreSQL tests, on the order of 5-10%
> > regression on some machines (but apparently not others).
>
> Do you have more details? From my experience (we do regular pgbench runs
> for various kernels in various configs in SUSE) PostgreSQL numbers tend to
> be somewhat noisy and more dependent on CPU scheduling and NUMA locality
> than anything else. But it very much depends on the exact config passed to
> pgbench so that's why I'm asking...

No, I don't really have many more details. I don't have things like
raw numbers or exact configurations, but Michael has been very
responsive if you ask, so if you are interested, just email him at
Michael Larabel <Michael@...haellarabel.com>.

It wasn't NUMA - apparently the machines he saw this on were just
plain consumer setups, and his larger machines didn't actually show
the effect. But yes, I suspect it was some scheduling artifact, and
probably just fairly random noise from just changing the scheduling
pattern a bit.

            Linus