During allocator-intensive workloads, kswapd will be woken frequently
causing free memory to oscillate between the high and min watermark. This
is expected behaviour. Unfortunately, if the highest zone is small, a
problem occurs.
When balance_pgdat() returns, it may be at a lower classzone_idx than it
started because the highest zone was unreclaimable. Before checking if it
should go to sleep though, it checks pgdat->classzone_idx which when there
is no other activity will be MAX_NR_ZONES-1. It interprets this as it has
been woken up while reclaiming, skips scheduling and reclaims again. As
there is no useful reclaim work to do, it enters into a loop of shrinking
slab consuming loads of CPU until the highest zone becomes reclaimable for
a long period of time.
There are two problems here. 1) If the returned classzone or order is
lower, it'll continue reclaiming without scheduling. 2) if the highest
zone was marked unreclaimable but balance_pgdat() returns immediately at
DEF_PRIORITY, the new lower classzone is not communicated back to kswapd()
for sleeping.
This patch does two things that are related. If the end_zone is
unreclaimable, this information is communicated back. Second, if the
classzone or order was reduced due to failing to reclaim, new information
is not read from pgdat and instead an attempt is made to go to sleep. Due
to this, it is also necessary that pgdat->classzone_idx be initialised
each time to pgdat->nr_zones - 1 to avoid re-reads being interpreted as
wakeups.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reported-by: Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com>
Tested-by: Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com>
Tested-by: Andrew Lutomirski <luto@mit.edu>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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