• Mel Gorman's avatar
    mm: vmscan: check for fatal signals iff the process was throttled · 50694c28
    Mel Gorman authored
    Commit 5515061d ("mm: throttle direct reclaimers if PF_MEMALLOC
    reserves are low and swap is backed by network storage") introduced a
    check for fatal signals after a process gets throttled for network
    storage.  The intention was that if a process was throttled and got
    killed that it should not trigger the OOM killer.  As pointed out by
    Minchan Kim and David Rientjes, this check is in the wrong place and too
    broad.  If a system is in am OOM situation and a process is exiting, it
    can loop in __alloc_pages_slowpath() and calling direct reclaim in a
    loop.  As the fatal signal is pending it returns 1 as if it is making
    forward progress and can effectively deadlock.
    
    This patch moves the fatal_signal_pending() check after throttling to
    throttle_direct_reclaim() where it belongs.  If the process is killed
    while throttled, it will return immediately without direct reclaim
    except now it will have TIF_MEMDIE set and will use the PFMEMALLOC
    reserves.
    
    Minchan pointed out that it may be better to direct reclaim before
    returning to avoid using the reserves because there may be pages that
    can easily reclaim that would avoid using the reserves.  However, we do
    no such targetted reclaim and there is no guarantee that suitable pages
    are available.  As it is expected that this throttling happens when
    swap-over-NFS is used there is a possibility that the process will
    instead swap which may allocate network buffers from the PFMEMALLOC
    reserves.  Hence, in the swap-over-nfs case where a process can be
    throtted and be killed it can use the reserves to exit or it can
    potentially use reserves to swap a few pages and then exit.  This patch
    takes the option of using the reserves if necessary to allow the process
    exit quickly.
    
    If this patch passes review it should be considered a -stable candidate
    for 3.6.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
    Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
    Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com>
    Cc: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com>
    Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
    Cc: Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@google.com>
    Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    50694c28
vmscan.c 99.8 KB