One of our services is observing hanging ps/top/etc under heavy write
IO, and the task states show this is an mmap_sem priority inversion:

A write fault is holding the mmap_sem in read-mode and waiting for
(heavily cgroup-limited) IO in balance_dirty_pages():

    balance_dirty_pages+0x724/0x905
    balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited+0x254/0x390
    fault_dirty_shared_page.isra.96+0x4a/0x90
    do_wp_page+0x33e/0x400
    __handle_mm_fault+0x6f0/0xfa0
    handle_mm_fault+0xe4/0x200
    __do_page_fault+0x22b/0x4a0
    page_fault+0x45/0x50

Somebody tries to change the address space, contending for the mmap_sem in
write-mode:

    call_rwsem_down_write_failed_killable+0x13/0x20
    do_mprotect_pkey+0xa8/0x330
    SyS_mprotect+0xf/0x20
    do_syscall_64+0x5b/0x100
    entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x3d/0xa2

The waiting writer locks out all subsequent readers to avoid lock
starvation, and several threads can be seen hanging like this:

    call_rwsem_down_read_failed+0x14/0x30
    proc_pid_cmdline_read+0xa0/0x480
    __vfs_read+0x23/0x140
    vfs_read+0x87/0x130
    SyS_read+0x42/0x90
    do_syscall_64+0x5b/0x100
    entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x3d/0xa2

To fix this, do what we do for cache read faults already: drop the
mmap_sem before calling into anything IO bound, in this case the
balance_dirty_pages() function, and return VM_FAULT_RETRY.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190924194238.GA29030@cmpxchg.orgSigned-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>
Cc: Hillf Danton <hdanton@sina.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>