4.4-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.
------------------
From: Hugh Dickins <hu...@google.com>
Synthetic filesystem mempressure testing has shown softlockups, with
hour-long page allocation stalls, and pgd_alloc() trying for order:1
with __GFP_REPEAT in one of the backtraces each time.
That's _pgd_alloc() going for a Kaiser double-pgd, using the __GFP_REPEAT
common to all page table allocations, but actually having no effect on
order:0 (see should_alloc_oom() and should_continue_reclaim() in this
tree, but beware that ports to another tree might behave differently).
Order:1 stack allocation has been working satisfactorily without
__GFP_REPEAT forever, and page table allocation only asks __GFP_REPEAT
for awkward occasions in a long-running process: it's not appropriate
at fork or exec time, and seems to be doing much more harm than good:
getting those contiguous pages under very heavy mempressure can be
hard (though even without it, Kaiser does generate more mempressure).
Mask out that __GFP_REPEAT inside _pgd_alloc(). Why not take it out
of the PGALLOG_GFP altogether, as v4.7 commit a3a9a59d2067 ("x86: get
rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT") did? Because I think that might
make a difference to our page table memcg charging, which I'd prefer
not to interfere with at this time.
hughd adds: __alloc_pages_slowpath() in the 4.4.89-stable tree handles
__GFP_REPEAT a little differently than in prod kernel or 3.18.72-stable,
so it may not always be exactly a no-op on order:0 pages, as said above;
but I think still appropriate to omit it from Kaiser or non-Kaiser pgd.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hu...@google.com>
Acked-by: Jiri Kosina <jkos...@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gre...@linuxfoundation.org>
---
arch/x86/mm/pgtable.c | 6 ++++--
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
--- a/arch/x86/mm/pgtable.c
+++ b/arch/x86/mm/pgtable.c
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
#include <asm/fixmap.h>
#include <asm/mtrr.h>
-#define PGALLOC_GFP GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NOTRACK | __GFP_REPEAT | __GFP_ZERO
+#define PGALLOC_GFP (GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NOTRACK | __GFP_REPEAT | __GFP_ZERO)
#ifdef CONFIG_HIGHPTE
#define PGALLOC_USER_GFP __GFP_HIGHMEM
@@ -354,7 +354,9 @@ static inline void _pgd_free(pgd_t *pgd)
static inline pgd_t *_pgd_alloc(void)
{
- return (pgd_t *)__get_free_pages(PGALLOC_GFP, PGD_ALLOCATION_ORDER);
+ /* No __GFP_REPEAT: to avoid page allocation stalls in order-1 case */
+ return (pgd_t *)__get_free_pages(PGALLOC_GFP & ~__GFP_REPEAT,
+ PGD_ALLOCATION_ORDER);
}
static inline void _pgd_free(pgd_t *pgd)
