4.4-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.
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From: Hugh Dickins hughd@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 hughd@google.com Acked-by: Jiri Kosina jkosina@suse.cz Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh@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)