Re: [PATCH] mm,vmscan: Use accurate values for zone_reclaimable() checks

[Michal Hocko]

On Sat 24-10-15 03:21:09, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 01:11:45PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > The problem here is not lack
> > > of execution resource but concurrency management misunderstanding the
> > > situation. 
> > 
> > And this sounds like a bug to me.
> 
> I don't know.  I can be argued either way, the other direction being a
> kernel thread going RUNNING non-stop is buggy.  Given how this has
> been a complete non-issue for all the years, I'm not sure how useful
> plugging this is.

Well, I guess we haven't noticed because this is a pathological case. It
also triggers OOM livelocks which were not reported in the past either.
You do not reach this state normally unless you rely _want_ to kill your
machine

And vmstat is not the only instance. E.g. sysrq oom trigger is known
to stay behind in similar cases. It should be changed to a dedicated
WQ_MEM_RECLAIM wq and it would require runnable item guarantee as well.

> > Don't we have some IO related paths which would suffer from the same
> > problem. I haven't checked all the WQ_MEM_RECLAIM users but from the
> > name I would expect they _do_ participate in the reclaim and so they
> > should be able to make a progress. Now if your new IMMEDIATE flag will
> 
> Seriously, nobody goes full-on RUNNING.

Looping with cond_resched seems like general pattern in the kernel when
there is no clear source to wait for. We have io_schedule when we know
we should wait for IO (in case of congestion) but this is not necessarily
the case - as you can see here. What should we wait for? A short nap
without actually waiting on anything sounds like a dirty workaround to
me.

> > guarantee that then I would argue that it should be implicit for
> > WQ_MEM_RECLAIM otherwise we always risk a similar situation. What would
> > be a counter argument for doing that?
> 
> Not serving any actual purpose and degrading execution behavior.

I dunno, I am not familiar with WQ internals to see the risks but to me
it sounds like WQ_MEM_RECLAIM gives an incorrect impression of safety
wrt. memory pressure and as demonstrated it doesn't do that. Even if you
consider cond_resched behavior of the page allocator as bug we should be
able to handle this gracefully.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
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