On Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:40:04 +0900 (JST)
KOSAKI Motohiro [off-list ref] wrote:

all_unreclaimable check in direct reclaim has been introduced at 2.6.19
by following commit.

	2006 Sep 25; commit 408d8544; oom: use unreclaimable info

And it went through strange history. firstly, following commit broke
the logic unintentionally.

	2008 Apr 29; commit a41f24ea; page allocator: smarter retry of
				      costly-order allocations

Two years later, I've found obvious meaningless code fragment and
restored original intention by following commit.

	2010 Jun 04; commit bb21c7ce; vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages()
				      return value when priority==0

But, the logic didn't works when 32bit highmem system goes hibernation
and Minchan slightly changed the algorithm and fixed it .

	2010 Sep 22: commit d1908362: vmscan: check all_unreclaimable
				      in direct reclaim path

But, recently, Andrey Vagin found the new corner case. Look,

	struct zone {
	  ..
	        int                     all_unreclaimable;
	  ..
	        unsigned long           pages_scanned;
	  ..
	}

zone->all_unreclaimable and zone->pages_scanned are neigher atomic
variables nor protected by lock. Therefore zones can become a state
of zone->page_scanned=0 and zone->all_unreclaimable=1. In this case,
current all_unreclaimable() return false even though
zone->all_unreclaimabe=1.

Is this ignorable minor issue? No. Unfortunatelly, x86 has very
small dma zone and it become zone->all_unreclamble=1 easily. and
if it become all_unreclaimable=1, it never restore all_unreclaimable=0.
Why? if all_unreclaimable=1, vmscan only try DEF_PRIORITY reclaim and
a-few-lru-pages>>DEF_PRIORITY always makes 0. that mean no page scan
at all!

Eventually, oom-killer never works on such systems. That said, we
can't use zone->pages_scanned for this purpose. This patch restore
all_unreclaimable() use zone->all_unreclaimable as old. and in addition,
to add oom_killer_disabled check to avoid reintroduce the issue of
commit d1908362.

Reported-by: Andrey Vagin <redacted>
Cc: Nick Piggin <redacted>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <redacted>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <redacted>
Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <redacted>

I think I saw this and this change of condition can avoid it.

Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <redacted>




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