On Fri 03-04-15 10:43:57, Nishanth Aravamudan wrote:

On 31.03.2015 [11:48:29 +0200], Michal Hocko wrote:

[...]

quoted

I would expect kswapd would be looping endlessly because the zone
wouldn't be balanced obviously. But I would be wrong... because
pgdat_balanced is doing this:
		/*
		 * A special case here:
		 *
		 * balance_pgdat() skips over all_unreclaimable after
		 * DEF_PRIORITY. Effectively, it considers them balanced so
		 * they must be considered balanced here as well!
		 */
		if (!zone_reclaimable(zone)) {
			balanced_pages += zone->managed_pages;
			continue;
		}

and zone_reclaimable is false for you as you didn't have any
zone_reclaimable_pages(). But wakeup_kswapd doesn't do this check so it
would see !zone_balanced() AFAICS (build_zonelists doesn't ignore those
zones right?) and so the kswapd would be woken up easily. So it looks
like a mess.

My understanding, and I could easily be wrong, is that kswapd2 (node 2
is the exhausted one) spins endlessly, because the reclaim logic sees
that we are reclaiming from somewhere but the allocation request for
node 2 (which is __GFP_THISNODE for hugepages, not GFP_THISNODE) will
never complete, so we just continue to reclaim.

__GFP_THISNODE would be waking up kswapd2 again and again, that is true.
I am just wondering whether we will have any __GFP_THISNODE allocations
for a node without CPUs (numa_node_id() shouldn't return such a node
AFAICS). Maybe if somebody is bound to Node2 explicitly but I would
consider this as a misconfiguration.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs