linux/include
Mel Gorman f90ac3982a mm: avoid livelock on !__GFP_FS allocations
Colin Cross reported;

  Under the following conditions, __alloc_pages_slowpath can loop forever:
  gfp_mask & __GFP_WAIT is true
  gfp_mask & __GFP_FS is false
  reclaim and compaction make no progress
  order <= PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER

  These conditions happen very often during suspend and resume,
  when pm_restrict_gfp_mask() effectively converts all GFP_KERNEL
  allocations into __GFP_WAIT.

  The oom killer is not run because gfp_mask & __GFP_FS is false,
  but should_alloc_retry will always return true when order is less
  than PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER.

In his fix, he avoided retrying the allocation if reclaim made no progress
and __GFP_FS was not set.  The problem is that this would result in
GFP_NOIO allocations failing that previously succeeded which would be very
unfortunate.

The big difference between GFP_NOIO and suspend converting GFP_KERNEL to
behave like GFP_NOIO is that normally flushers will be cleaning pages and
kswapd reclaims pages allowing GFP_NOIO to succeed after a short delay.
The same does not necessarily apply during suspend as the storage device
may be suspended.

This patch special cases the suspend case to fail the page allocation if
reclaim cannot make progress and adds some documentation on how
gfp_allowed_mask is currently used.  Failing allocations like this may
cause suspend to abort but that is better than a livelock.

[mgorman@suse.de: Rework fix to be suspend specific]
[rientjes@google.com: Move suspended device check to should_alloc_retry]
Reported-by: Colin Cross <ccross@android.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-10 16:30:42 -08:00
..
acpi Merge branch 'release' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/lenb/linux 2011-11-07 10:13:52 -08:00
asm-generic Merge branch 'for-linus2' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2012-01-08 12:19:57 -08:00
crypto crypto: Add a report function pointer to crypto_type 2011-10-21 14:24:03 +02:00
drm Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial 2012-01-08 13:21:22 -08:00
keys
linux mm: avoid livelock on !__GFP_FS allocations 2012-01-10 16:30:42 -08:00
math-emu
media Merge branch 'depends/rmk/restart' into next/cleanup 2012-01-07 11:51:28 +00:00
misc
mtd
net Merge branch 'for-3.3' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/percpu 2012-01-09 13:08:28 -08:00
pcmcia
rdma rdma/core: Fix sparse warnings 2012-01-04 09:17:45 -08:00
rxrpc
scsi switch ->is_visible() to returning umode_t 2012-01-03 22:54:55 -05:00
sound Driver specific changes 2012-01-09 14:39:22 -08:00
target target: remove the unused se_dev_list 2011-12-06 06:00:57 +00:00
trace mm-tracepoint: rename page-free events 2012-01-10 16:30:41 -08:00
video ARM: OMAP: HWMOD: Unify DSS resets for OMAPs 2011-11-08 03:16:13 -07:00
xen Merge branch 'driver-core-next' into Linux 3.2 2012-01-06 11:42:52 -08:00
Kbuild