mm: fix 100% CPU kswapd busyloop on unreclaimable nodes

Patch series "mm: kswapd spinning on unreclaimable nodes - fixes and
cleanups".

Jia reported a scenario in which the kswapd of a node indefinitely spins
at 100% CPU usage.  We have seen similar cases at Facebook.

The kernel's current method of judging its ability to reclaim a node (or
whether to back off and sleep) is based on the amount of scanned pages
in proportion to the amount of reclaimable pages.  In Jia's and our
scenarios, there are no reclaimable pages in the node, however, and the
condition for backing off is never met.  Kswapd busyloops in an attempt
to restore the watermarks while having nothing to work with.

This series reworks the definition of an unreclaimable node based not on
scanning but on whether kswapd is able to actually reclaim pages in
MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES (16) consecutive runs.  This is the same criteria
the page allocator uses for giving up on direct reclaim and invoking the
OOM killer.  If it cannot free any pages, kswapd will go to sleep and
leave further attempts to direct reclaim invocations, which will either
make progress and re-enable kswapd, or invoke the OOM killer.

Patch #1 fixes the immediate problem Jia reported, the remainder are
smaller fixlets, cleanups, and overall phasing out of the old method.

Patch #6 is the odd one out.  It's a nice cleanup to get_scan_count(),
and directly related to #5, but in itself not relevant to the series.

If the whole series is too ambitious for 4.11, I would consider the
first three patches fixes, the rest cleanups.

This patch (of 9):

Jia He reports a problem with kswapd spinning at 100% CPU when
requesting more hugepages than memory available in the system:

$ echo 4000 >/proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages

top - 13:42:59 up  3:37,  1 user,  load average: 1.09, 1.03, 1.01
Tasks:   1 total,   1 running,   0 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.0 us, 12.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 85.5 id,  2.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:  31371520 total, 30915136 used,   456384 free,      320 buffers
KiB Swap:  6284224 total,   115712 used,  6168512 free.    48192 cached Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
   76 root      20   0       0      0      0 R 100.0 0.000 217:17.29 kswapd3

At that time, there are no reclaimable pages left in the node, but as
kswapd fails to restore the high watermarks it refuses to go to sleep.

Kswapd needs to back away from nodes that fail to balance.  Up until
commit 1d82de618ddd ("mm, vmscan: make kswapd reclaim in terms of
nodes") kswapd had such a mechanism.  It considered zones whose
theoretically reclaimable pages it had reclaimed six times over as
unreclaimable and backed away from them.  This guard was erroneously
removed as the patch changed the definition of a balanced node.

However, simply restoring this code wouldn't help in the case reported
here: there *are* no reclaimable pages that could be scanned until the
threshold is met.  Kswapd would stay awake anyway.

Introduce a new and much simpler way of backing off.  If kswapd runs
through MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES (16) cycles without reclaiming a single
page, make it back off from the node.  This is the same number of shots
direct reclaim takes before declaring OOM.  Kswapd will go to sleep on
that node until a direct reclaimer manages to reclaim some pages, thus
proving the node reclaimable again.

[hannes@cmpxchg.org: check kswapd failure against the cumulative nr_reclaimed count]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170306162410.GB2090@cmpxchg.org
[shakeelb@google.com: fix condition for throttle_direct_reclaim]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170314183228.20152-1-shakeelb@google.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170228214007.5621-2-hannes@cmpxchg.org
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Reported-by: Jia He <hejianet@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Jia He <hejianet@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Hillf Danton <hillf.zj@alibaba-inc.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/internal.h b/mm/internal.h
index 266efae..e5a0e0e 100644
--- a/mm/internal.h
+++ b/mm/internal.h
@@ -81,6 +81,12 @@ static inline void set_page_refcounted(struct page *page)
 extern unsigned long highest_memmap_pfn;
 
 /*
+ * Maximum number of reclaim retries without progress before the OOM
+ * killer is consider the only way forward.
+ */
+#define MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES 16
+
+/*
  * in mm/vmscan.c:
  */
 extern int isolate_lru_page(struct page *page);