vmscan: do not unconditionally treat zones that fail zone_reclaim() as full
On NUMA machines, the administrator can configure zone_reclaim_mode that
is a more targetted form of direct reclaim. On machines with large NUMA
distances for example, a zone_reclaim_mode defaults to 1 meaning that
clean unmapped pages will be reclaimed if the zone watermarks are not
being met. The problem is that zone_reclaim() failing at all means the
zone gets marked full.
This can cause situations where a zone is usable, but is being skipped
because it has been considered full. Take a situation where a large tmpfs
mount is occuping a large percentage of memory overall. The pages do not
get cleaned or reclaimed by zone_reclaim(), but the zone gets marked full
and the zonelist cache considers them not worth trying in the future.
This patch makes zone_reclaim() return more fine-grained information about
what occured when zone_reclaim() failued. The zone only gets marked full
if it really is unreclaimable. If it's a case that the scan did not occur
or if enough pages were not reclaimed with the limited reclaim_mode, then
the zone is simply skipped.
There is a side-effect to this patch. Currently, if zone_reclaim()
successfully reclaimed SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX, an allocation attempt would go
ahead. With this patch applied, zone watermarks are rechecked after
zone_reclaim() does some work.
This bug was introduced by commit 9276b1bc96a132f4068fdee00983c532f43d3a26
("memory page_alloc zonelist caching speedup") way back in 2.6.19 when the
zonelist_cache was introduced. It was not intended that zone_reclaim()
aggressively consider the zone to be full when it failed as full direct
reclaim can still be an option. Due to the age of the bug, it should be
considered a -stable candidate.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 79a98d9..16c82a8 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -2492,16 +2492,16 @@
*/
if (zone_pagecache_reclaimable(zone) <= zone->min_unmapped_pages &&
zone_page_state(zone, NR_SLAB_RECLAIMABLE) <= zone->min_slab_pages)
- return 0;
+ return ZONE_RECLAIM_FULL;
if (zone_is_all_unreclaimable(zone))
- return 0;
+ return ZONE_RECLAIM_FULL;
/*
* Do not scan if the allocation should not be delayed.
*/
if (!(gfp_mask & __GFP_WAIT) || (current->flags & PF_MEMALLOC))
- return 0;
+ return ZONE_RECLAIM_NOSCAN;
/*
* Only run zone reclaim on the local zone or on zones that do not
@@ -2511,10 +2511,11 @@
*/
node_id = zone_to_nid(zone);
if (node_state(node_id, N_CPU) && node_id != numa_node_id())
- return 0;
+ return ZONE_RECLAIM_NOSCAN;
if (zone_test_and_set_flag(zone, ZONE_RECLAIM_LOCKED))
- return 0;
+ return ZONE_RECLAIM_NOSCAN;
+
ret = __zone_reclaim(zone, gfp_mask, order);
zone_clear_flag(zone, ZONE_RECLAIM_LOCKED);