The quilt patch titled Subject: mm, swap: do not perform synchronous discard during allocation has been removed from the -mm tree. Its filename was mm-swap-do-not-perform-synchronous-discard-during-allocation.patch
This patch was dropped because it was merged into the mm-stable branch of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm
------------------------------------------------------ From: Kairui Song kasong@tencent.com Subject: mm, swap: do not perform synchronous discard during allocation Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2025 02:34:11 +0800
Patch series "mm, swap: misc cleanup and bugfix", v2.
A few cleanups and a bugfix that are either suitable after the swap table phase I or found during code review.
Patch 1 is a bugfix and needs to be included in the stable branch, the rest have no behavioral change.
This patch (of 5):
Since commit 1b7e90020eb77 ("mm, swap: use percpu cluster as allocation fast path"), swap allocation is protected by a local lock, which means we can't do any sleeping calls during allocation.
However, the discard routine is not taken well care of. When the swap allocator failed to find any usable cluster, it would look at the pending discard cluster and try to issue some blocking discards. It may not necessarily sleep, but the cond_resched at the bio layer indicates this is wrong when combined with a local lock. And the bio GFP flag used for discard bio is also wrong (not atomic).
It's arguable whether this synchronous discard is helpful at all. In most cases, the async discard is good enough. And the swap allocator is doing very differently at organizing the clusters since the recent change, so it is very rare to see discard clusters piling up.
So far, no issues have been observed or reported with typical SSD setups under months of high pressure. This issue was found during my code review. But by hacking the kernel a bit: adding a mdelay(500) in the async discard path, this issue will be observable with WARNING triggered by the wrong GFP and cond_resched in the bio layer for debug builds.
So now let's apply a hotfix for this issue: remove the synchronous discard in the swap allocation path. And when order 0 is failing with all cluster list drained on all swap devices, try to do a discard following the swap device priority list. If any discards released some cluster, try the allocation again. This way, we can still avoid OOM due to swap failure if the hardware is very slow and memory pressure is extremely high.
This may cause more fragmentation issues if the discarding hardware is really slow. Ideally, we want to discard pending clusters before continuing to iterate the fragment cluster lists. This can be implemented in a cleaner way if we clean up the device list iteration part first.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20251024-swap-clean-after-swap-table-p1-v2-0-a7094... Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20251024-swap-clean-after-swap-table-p1-v2-1-c5b0e... Fixes: 1b7e90020eb7 ("mm, swap: use percpu cluster as allocation fast path") Signed-off-by: Kairui Song kasong@tencent.com Acked-by: Nhat Pham nphamcs@gmail.com Acked-by: Chris Li chrisl@kernel.org Cc: Baolin Wang baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com Cc: Baoquan He bhe@redhat.com Cc: Barry Song baohua@kernel.org Cc: David Hildenbrand david@redhat.com Cc: "Huang, Ying" ying.huang@linux.alibaba.com Cc: Kemeng Shi shikemeng@huaweicloud.com Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) willy@infradead.org Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton akpm@linux-foundation.org ---
mm/swapfile.c | 40 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------- 1 file changed, 33 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)
--- a/mm/swapfile.c~mm-swap-do-not-perform-synchronous-discard-during-allocation +++ a/mm/swapfile.c @@ -1101,13 +1101,6 @@ new_cluster: goto done; }
- /* - * We don't have free cluster but have some clusters in discarding, - * do discard now and reclaim them. - */ - if ((si->flags & SWP_PAGE_DISCARD) && swap_do_scheduled_discard(si)) - goto new_cluster; - if (order) goto done;
@@ -1394,6 +1387,33 @@ start_over: return false; }
+/* + * Discard pending clusters in a synchronized way when under high pressure. + * Return: true if any cluster is discarded. + */ +static bool swap_sync_discard(void) +{ + bool ret = false; + int nid = numa_node_id(); + struct swap_info_struct *si, *next; + + spin_lock(&swap_avail_lock); + plist_for_each_entry_safe(si, next, &swap_avail_heads[nid], avail_lists[nid]) { + spin_unlock(&swap_avail_lock); + if (get_swap_device_info(si)) { + if (si->flags & SWP_PAGE_DISCARD) + ret = swap_do_scheduled_discard(si); + put_swap_device(si); + } + if (ret) + return true; + spin_lock(&swap_avail_lock); + } + spin_unlock(&swap_avail_lock); + + return false; +} + /** * folio_alloc_swap - allocate swap space for a folio * @folio: folio we want to move to swap @@ -1432,11 +1452,17 @@ int folio_alloc_swap(struct folio *folio } }
+again: local_lock(&percpu_swap_cluster.lock); if (!swap_alloc_fast(&entry, order)) swap_alloc_slow(&entry, order); local_unlock(&percpu_swap_cluster.lock);
+ if (unlikely(!order && !entry.val)) { + if (swap_sync_discard()) + goto again; + } + /* Need to call this even if allocation failed, for MEMCG_SWAP_FAIL. */ if (mem_cgroup_try_charge_swap(folio, entry)) goto out_free; _
Patches currently in -mm which might be from kasong@tencent.com are