Commit 75083aae authored by Hugh Dickins's avatar Hugh Dickins Committed by Linus Torvalds

mm: /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh skip checking known negative stats

vmstat_refresh() can occasionally catch nr_zone_write_pending and
nr_writeback when they are transiently negative.  The reason is partly
that the interrupt which decrements them in test_clear_page_writeback()
can come in before __test_set_page_writeback() got to increment them;
but transient negatives are still seen even when that is prevented, and
I am not yet certain why (but see Roman's note below).  Those stats are
not buggy, they have never been seen to drift away from 0 permanently:
so just avoid the annoyance of showing a warning on them.

Similarly avoid showing a warning on nr_free_cma: CMA users have seen
that one reported negative from /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh too, but it
does drift away permanently: I believe that's because its incrementation
and decrementation are decided by page migratetype, but the migratetype
of a pageblock is not guaranteed to be constant.

Roman Gushchin points out:
 "For performance reasons, vmstat counters are incremented and
  decremented using per-cpu batches. vmstat_refresh() flushes the
  per-cpu batches on all CPUs, to get values as accurate as possible;
  but this method is not atomic, so the resulting value is not always
  precise.

  As a consequence, for those counters whose actual value is close to 0,
  a small negative value may occasionally be reported. If the value is
  small and the state is transient, it is not an indication of an error"

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20200714173747.3315771-1-guro@fb.com/
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/alpine.LSU.2.11.2103012158540.7549@eggly.anvilsSigned-off-by: default avatarHugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Reported-by: default avatarRoman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Acked-by: default avatarRoman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 6d99a4c0
......@@ -1858,6 +1858,14 @@ int vmstat_refresh(struct ctl_table *table, int write,
if (err)
return err;
for (i = 0; i < NR_VM_ZONE_STAT_ITEMS; i++) {
/*
* Skip checking stats known to go negative occasionally.
*/
switch (i) {
case NR_ZONE_WRITE_PENDING:
case NR_FREE_CMA_PAGES:
continue;
}
val = atomic_long_read(&vm_zone_stat[i]);
if (val < 0) {
pr_warn("%s: %s %ld\n",
......@@ -1874,6 +1882,13 @@ int vmstat_refresh(struct ctl_table *table, int write,
}
#endif
for (i = 0; i < NR_VM_NODE_STAT_ITEMS; i++) {
/*
* Skip checking stats known to go negative occasionally.
*/
switch (i) {
case NR_WRITEBACK:
continue;
}
val = atomic_long_read(&vm_node_stat[i]);
if (val < 0) {
pr_warn("%s: %s %ld\n",
......
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