We've had a report about soft lockups caused by lock bouncing in the
soft reclaim path:

  BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s! [kav4proxy-kavic:3128]
  RIP: 0010:[<ffffffff81469798>]  [<ffffffff81469798>] _raw_spin_lock+0x18/0x20
  Call Trace:
    mem_cgroup_soft_limit_reclaim+0x25a/0x280
    shrink_zones+0xed/0x200
    do_try_to_free_pages+0x74/0x320
    try_to_free_pages+0x112/0x180
    __alloc_pages_slowpath+0x3ff/0x820
    __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x1e9/0x200
    alloc_pages_vma+0xe1/0x290
    do_wp_page+0x19f/0x840
    handle_pte_fault+0x1cd/0x230
    do_page_fault+0x1fd/0x4c0
    page_fault+0x25/0x30

There are no memcgs created so there cannot be any in the soft limit
excess obviously:

  [...]
  memory  0       1       1

so all this just seems to be mem_cgroup_largest_soft_limit_node trying
to get spin_lock_irq(&mctz->lock) just to find out that the soft limit
excess tree is empty.  This is just pointless wasting of cycles and
cache line bouncing during heavy parallel reclaim on large machines.
The particular machine wasn't very healthy and most probably suffering
from a memory leak which just caused the memory reclaim to trash
heavily.  But bouncing on the lock certainly didn't help...

Fix this by optimistic lockless check and bail out early if the tree is
empty.  This is theoretically racy but that shouldn't matter all that
much.  First of all soft limit is a best effort feature and it is slowly
getting deprecated and its usage should be really scarce.  Bouncing on a
lock without a good reason is surely much bigger problem, especially on
large CPU machines.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1470073277-1056-1-git-send-email-mhocko@kernel.org


Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov@virtuozzo.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>