mm, vmscan: prevent kswapd livelock due to pfmemalloc-throttled process being killed
Charles Shirron and Paul Cassella from Cray Inc have reported kswapd stuck in a busy loop with nothing left to balance, but kswapd_try_to_sleep() failing to sleep. Their analysis found the cause to be a combination of several factors: 1. A process is waiting in throttle_direct_reclaim() on pgdat->pfmemalloc_wait 2. The process has been killed (by OOM in this case), but has not yet been scheduled to remove itself from the waitqueue and die. 3. kswapd checks for throttled processes in prepare_kswapd_sleep(): if (waitqueue_active(&pgdat->pfmemalloc_wait)) { wake_up(&pgdat->pfmemalloc_wait); return false; // kswapd will not go to sleep } However, for a process that was already killed, wake_up() does not remove the process from the waitqueue, since try_to_wake_up() checks its state first and returns false when the process is no longer waiting. 4. kswapd is running on the same CPU a...
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