tree 526dd574ec3d35bc39a4a05759a8f4c33f91abb3
parent e62e384e9da8d9a0c599795464a7e76fd490931c
author Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> 1343778359 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1343785369 -0700

memcg: further prevent OOM with too many dirty pages

The may_enter_fs test turns out to be too restrictive: though I saw no
problem with it when testing on 3.5-rc6, it very soon OOMed when I tested
on 3.5-rc6-mm1.  I don't know what the difference there is, perhaps I just
slightly changed the way I started off the testing: dd if=/dev/zero
of=/mnt/temp bs=1M count=1024; rm -f /mnt/temp; sync repeatedly, in 20M
memory.limit_in_bytes cgroup to ext4 on USB stick.

ext4 (and gfs2 and xfs) turn out to allocate new pages for writing with
AOP_FLAG_NOFS: that seems a little worrying, and it's unclear to me why
the transaction needs to be started even before allocating pagecache
memory.  But it may not be worth worrying about these days: if direct
reclaim avoids FS writeback, does __GFP_FS now mean anything?

Anyway, we insisted on the may_enter_fs test to avoid hangs with the loop
device; but since that also masks off __GFP_IO, we can test for __GFP_IO
directly, ignoring may_enter_fs and __GFP_FS.

But even so, the test still OOMs sometimes: when originally testing on
3.5-rc6, it OOMed about one time in five or ten; when testing just now on
3.5-rc6-mm1, it OOMed on the first iteration.

This residual problem comes from an accumulation of pages under ordinary
writeback, not marked PageReclaim, so rightly not causing the memcg check
to wait on their writeback: these too can prevent shrink_page_list() from
freeing any pages, so many times that memcg reclaim fails and OOMs.

Deal with these in the same way as direct reclaim now deals with dirty FS
pages: mark them PageReclaim.  It is appropriate to rotate these to tail
of list when writepage completes, but more importantly, the PageReclaim
flag makes memcg reclaim wait on them if encountered again.  Increment
NR_VMSCAN_IMMEDIATE?  That's arguable: I chose not.

Setting PageReclaim here may occasionally race with end_page_writeback()
clearing it: lru_deactivate_fn() already faced the same race, and
correctly concluded that the window is small and the issue non-critical.

With these changes, the test runs indefinitely without OOMing on ext4,
ext3 and ext2: I'll move on to test with other filesystems later.

Trivia: invert conditions for a clearer block without an else, and goto
keep_locked to do the unlock_page.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujtisu.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>