[PATCH 4.8 021/138] mm: memcontrol: do not recurse in direct reclaim

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman
Date: Wed Nov 09 2016 - 06:05:43 EST


4.8-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.

------------------

From: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

commit 89a2848381b5fcd9c4d9c0cd97680e3b28730e31 upstream.

On 4.0, we saw a stack corruption from a page fault entering direct
memory cgroup reclaim, calling into btrfs_releasepage(), which then
tried to allocate an extent and recursed back into a kmem charge ad
nauseam:

[...]
btrfs_releasepage+0x2c/0x30
try_to_release_page+0x32/0x50
shrink_page_list+0x6da/0x7a0
shrink_inactive_list+0x1e5/0x510
shrink_lruvec+0x605/0x7f0
shrink_zone+0xee/0x320
do_try_to_free_pages+0x174/0x440
try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages+0xa7/0x130
try_charge+0x17b/0x830
memcg_charge_kmem+0x40/0x80
new_slab+0x2d9/0x5a0
__slab_alloc+0x2fd/0x44f
kmem_cache_alloc+0x193/0x1e0
alloc_extent_state+0x21/0xc0
__clear_extent_bit+0x2b5/0x400
try_release_extent_mapping+0x1a3/0x220
__btrfs_releasepage+0x31/0x70
btrfs_releasepage+0x2c/0x30
try_to_release_page+0x32/0x50
shrink_page_list+0x6da/0x7a0
shrink_inactive_list+0x1e5/0x510
shrink_lruvec+0x605/0x7f0
shrink_zone+0xee/0x320
do_try_to_free_pages+0x174/0x440
try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages+0xa7/0x130
try_charge+0x17b/0x830
mem_cgroup_try_charge+0x65/0x1c0
handle_mm_fault+0x117f/0x1510
__do_page_fault+0x177/0x420
do_page_fault+0xc/0x10
page_fault+0x22/0x30

On later kernels, kmem charging is opt-in rather than opt-out, and that
particular kmem allocation in btrfs_releasepage() is no longer being
charged and won't recurse and overrun the stack anymore.

But it's not impossible for an accounted allocation to happen from the
memcg direct reclaim context, and we needed to reproduce this crash many
times before we even got a useful stack trace out of it.

Like other direct reclaimers, mark tasks in memcg reclaim PF_MEMALLOC to
avoid recursing into any other form of direct reclaim. Then let
recursive charges from PF_MEMALLOC contexts bypass the cgroup limit.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20161025141050.GA13019@xxxxxxxxxxx
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

---
mm/memcontrol.c | 9 +++++++++
mm/vmscan.c | 2 ++
2 files changed, 11 insertions(+)

--- a/mm/memcontrol.c
+++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
@@ -1947,6 +1947,15 @@ retry:
current->flags & PF_EXITING))
goto force;

+ /*
+ * Prevent unbounded recursion when reclaim operations need to
+ * allocate memory. This might exceed the limits temporarily,
+ * but we prefer facilitating memory reclaim and getting back
+ * under the limit over triggering OOM kills in these cases.
+ */
+ if (unlikely(current->flags & PF_MEMALLOC))
+ goto force;
+
if (unlikely(task_in_memcg_oom(current)))
goto nomem;

--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -3048,7 +3048,9 @@ unsigned long try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pag
sc.gfp_mask,
sc.reclaim_idx);

+ current->flags |= PF_MEMALLOC;
nr_reclaimed = do_try_to_free_pages(zonelist, &sc);
+ current->flags &= ~PF_MEMALLOC;

trace_mm_vmscan_memcg_reclaim_end(nr_reclaimed);