The patch below does not apply to the 3.18-stable tree. If someone wants it applied there, or to any other stable or longterm tree, then please email the backport, including the original git commit id to stable@vger.kernel.org.
thanks,
greg k-h
------------------ original commit in Linus's tree ------------------
From 63f3655f950186752236bb88a22f8252c11ce394 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Michal Hocko mhocko@suse.com Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2019 15:23:07 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] mm, memcg: fix reclaim deadlock with writeback
Liu Bo has experienced a deadlock between memcg (legacy) reclaim and the ext4 writeback
task1: wait_on_page_bit+0x82/0xa0 shrink_page_list+0x907/0x960 shrink_inactive_list+0x2c7/0x680 shrink_node_memcg+0x404/0x830 shrink_node+0xd8/0x300 do_try_to_free_pages+0x10d/0x330 try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages+0xd5/0x1b0 try_charge+0x14d/0x720 memcg_kmem_charge_memcg+0x3c/0xa0 memcg_kmem_charge+0x7e/0xd0 __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x178/0x260 alloc_pages_current+0x95/0x140 pte_alloc_one+0x17/0x40 __pte_alloc+0x1e/0x110 alloc_set_pte+0x5fe/0xc20 do_fault+0x103/0x970 handle_mm_fault+0x61e/0xd10 __do_page_fault+0x252/0x4d0 do_page_fault+0x30/0x80 page_fault+0x28/0x30
task2: __lock_page+0x86/0xa0 mpage_prepare_extent_to_map+0x2e7/0x310 [ext4] ext4_writepages+0x479/0xd60 do_writepages+0x1e/0x30 __writeback_single_inode+0x45/0x320 writeback_sb_inodes+0x272/0x600 __writeback_inodes_wb+0x92/0xc0 wb_writeback+0x268/0x300 wb_workfn+0xb4/0x390 process_one_work+0x189/0x420 worker_thread+0x4e/0x4b0 kthread+0xe6/0x100 ret_from_fork+0x41/0x50
He adds "task1 is waiting for the PageWriteback bit of the page that task2 has collected in mpd->io_submit->io_bio, and tasks2 is waiting for the LOCKED bit the page which tasks1 has locked"
More precisely task1 is handling a page fault and it has a page locked while it charges a new page table to a memcg. That in turn hits a memory limit reclaim and the memcg reclaim for legacy controller is waiting on the writeback but that is never going to finish because the writeback itself is waiting for the page locked in the #PF path. So this is essentially ABBA deadlock:
lock_page(A) SetPageWriteback(A) unlock_page(A) lock_page(B) lock_page(B) pte_alloc_pne shrink_page_list wait_on_page_writeback(A) SetPageWriteback(B) unlock_page(B)
# flush A, B to clear the writeback
This accumulating of more pages to flush is used by several filesystems to generate a more optimal IO patterns.
Waiting for the writeback in legacy memcg controller is a workaround for pre-mature OOM killer invocations because there is no dirty IO throttling available for the controller. There is no easy way around that unfortunately. Therefore fix this specific issue by pre-allocating the page table outside of the page lock. We have that handy infrastructure for that already so simply reuse the fault-around pattern which already does this.
There are probably other hidden __GFP_ACCOUNT | GFP_KERNEL allocations from under a fs page locked but they should be really rare. I am not aware of a better solution unfortunately.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix mm/memory.c:__do_fault()] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] [mhocko@kernel.org: enhance comment, per Johannes] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181214084948.GA5624@dhcp22.suse.cz Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181213092221.27270-1-mhocko@kernel.org Fixes: c3b94f44fcb0 ("memcg: further prevent OOM with too many dirty pages") Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko mhocko@suse.com Reported-by: Liu Bo bo.liu@linux.alibaba.com Debugged-by: Liu Bo bo.liu@linux.alibaba.com Acked-by: Kirill A. Shutemov kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com Acked-by: Johannes Weiner hannes@cmpxchg.org Reviewed-by: Liu Bo bo.liu@linux.alibaba.com Cc: Jan Kara jack@suse.cz Cc: Dave Chinner david@fromorbit.com Cc: Theodore Ts'o tytso@mit.edu Cc: Vladimir Davydov vdavydov.dev@gmail.com Cc: Shakeel Butt shakeelb@google.com Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton akpm@linux-foundation.org Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org
diff --git a/mm/memory.c b/mm/memory.c index a52663c0612d..5e46836714dc 100644 --- a/mm/memory.c +++ b/mm/memory.c @@ -2994,6 +2994,28 @@ static vm_fault_t __do_fault(struct vm_fault *vmf) struct vm_area_struct *vma = vmf->vma; vm_fault_t ret;
+ /* + * Preallocate pte before we take page_lock because this might lead to + * deadlocks for memcg reclaim which waits for pages under writeback: + * lock_page(A) + * SetPageWriteback(A) + * unlock_page(A) + * lock_page(B) + * lock_page(B) + * pte_alloc_pne + * shrink_page_list + * wait_on_page_writeback(A) + * SetPageWriteback(B) + * unlock_page(B) + * # flush A, B to clear the writeback + */ + if (pmd_none(*vmf->pmd) && !vmf->prealloc_pte) { + vmf->prealloc_pte = pte_alloc_one(vmf->vma->vm_mm); + if (!vmf->prealloc_pte) + return VM_FAULT_OOM; + smp_wmb(); /* See comment in __pte_alloc() */ + } + ret = vma->vm_ops->fault(vmf); if (unlikely(ret & (VM_FAULT_ERROR | VM_FAULT_NOPAGE | VM_FAULT_RETRY | VM_FAULT_DONE_COW)))