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Michal Hocko authored
This reverts commit f9054c70 ("mm, mempool: only set __GFP_NOMEMALLOC if there are free elements"). There has been a report about OOM killer invoked when swapping out to a dm-crypt device. The primary reason seems to be that the swapout out IO managed to completely deplete memory reserves. Ondrej was able to bisect and explained the issue by pointing to f9054c70 ("mm, mempool: only set __GFP_NOMEMALLOC if there are free elements"). The reason is that the swapout path is not throttled properly because the md-raid layer needs to allocate from the generic_make_request path which means it allocates from the PF_MEMALLOC context. dm layer uses mempool_alloc in order to guarantee a forward progress which used to inhibit access to memory reserves when using page allocator. This has changed by f9054c70 ("mm, mempool: only set __GFP_NOMEMALLOC if there are free elements") which has dropped the __GFP_NOMEMALLOC protection when the memory pool is depleted. If we are running out of memory and the only way forward to free memory is to perform swapout we just keep consuming memory reserves rather than throttling the mempool allocations and allowing the pending IO to complete up to a moment when the memory is depleted completely and there is no way forward but invoking the OOM killer. This is less than optimal. The original intention of f9054c70 was to help with the OOM situations where the oom victim depends on mempool allocation to make a forward progress. David has mentioned the following backtrace: schedule schedule_timeout io_schedule_timeout mempool_alloc __split_and_process_bio dm_request generic_make_request submit_bio mpage_readpages ext4_readpages __do_page_cache_readahead ra_submit filemap_fault handle_mm_fault __do_page_fault do_page_fault page_fault We do not know more about why the mempool is depleted without being replenished in time, though. In any case the dm layer shouldn't depend on any allocations outside of the dedicated pools so a forward progress should be guaranteed. If this is not the case then the dm should be fixed rather than papering over the problem and postponing it to later by accessing more memory reserves. mempools are a mechanism to maintain dedicated memory reserves to guaratee forward progress. Allowing them an unbounded access to the page allocator memory reserves is going against the whole purpose of this mechanism. Bisected by Ondrej Kozina. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160721145309.GR26379@dhcp22.suse.cz Signed-off-by:
Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Reported-by:
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