vmscan: fix a livelock in kswapd

BugLink: http://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/813797

I'm running a workload which triggers a lot of swap in a machine with 4
nodes.  After I kill the workload, I found a kswapd livelock.  Sometimes
kswapd3 or kswapd2 are keeping running and I can't access filesystem,
but most memory is free.

This looks like a regression since commit 08951e545918c159 ("mm: vmscan:
correct check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely").

Node 2 and 3 have only ZONE_NORMAL, but balance_pgdat() will return 0
for classzone_idx.  The reason is end_zone in balance_pgdat() is 0 by
default, if all zones have watermark ok, end_zone will keep 0.

Later sleeping_prematurely() always returns true.  Because this is an
order 3 wakeup, and if classzone_idx is 0, both balanced_pages and
present_pages in pgdat_balanced() are 0.  We add a special case here.
If a zone has no page, we think it's balanced.  This fixes the livelock.

Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <andy.whitcroft@canonical.com>
Acked-by: Stefan Bader <stefan.bader@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Tim Gardner <tim.gardner@canonical.com>

diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 4b8b37c..1e0eefe 100644 (file)
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -2245,7 +2245,8 @@ static bool pgdat_balanced(pg_data_t *pgdat, unsigned long balanced_pages,
        for (i = 0; i <= classzone_idx; i++)
                present_pages += pgdat->node_zones[i].present_pages;
 
        for (i = 0; i <= classzone_idx; i++)
                present_pages += pgdat->node_zones[i].present_pages;
 

-       return balanced_pages > (present_pages >> 2);
+       /* A special case here: if zone has no page, we think it's balanced */
+       return balanced_pages >= (present_pages >> 2);

 }
 
 /* is kswapd sleeping prematurely? */
 }
 
 /* is kswapd sleeping prematurely? */