fix incorrect NR_FREE_PAGES accounting (appears like memory leak)
There have been some 3.7-rc reports of vm issues, including some kswapd bugs and, more importantly, some memory "leaks": http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg46187.html https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50181 Commit 1fb3f8ca ("mm: compaction: capture a suitable high-order page immediately when it is made available") took split_free_page() and reused it for the compaction code. It does something curious with capture_free_page() (previously known as split_free_page()): int capture_free_page(struct page *page, int alloc_order, ... __mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES, -(1UL << order)); - /* Split into individual pages */ - set_page_refcounted(page); - split_page(page, order); + if (alloc_order != order) + expand(zone, page, alloc_order, order, + &zone->free_area[order], migratetype); Note that expand() puts the pages _back_ in the allocator, but it does not bump NR_FREE_PAGES. We "return" 'alloc_order' worth of pages, but we accounted for removing 'order' in the __mod_zone_page_state() call. For the old split_page()-style use (order==alloc_order) the bug will not trigger. But, when called from the compaction code where we occasionally get a larger page out of the buddy allocator than we need, we will run in to this. This patch simply changes the NR_FREE_PAGES manipulation to the correct 'alloc_order' instead of 'order'. I've been able to repeatedly trigger this in my testing environment. The amount "leaked" very closely tracks the imbalance I see in buddy pages vs. NR_FREE_PAGES. I have confirmed that this patch fixes the imbalance Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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