On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, David Rientjes wrote: > On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, Mikulas Patocka wrote: > > > What are the real problems that f9054c70d28bc214b2857cf8db8269f4f45a5e23 > > tries to fix? > > > > It prevents the whole system from livelocking due to an oom killed process > stalling forever waiting for mempool_alloc() to return. No other threads > may be oom killed while waiting for it to exit. > > > Do you have a stacktrace where it deadlocked, or was just a theoretical > > consideration? > > > > schedule > schedule_timeout > io_schedule_timeout > mempool_alloc > __split_and_process_bio > dm_request > generic_make_request > submit_bio > mpage_readpages > ext4_readpages > __do_page_cache_readahead > ra_submit > filemap_fault > handle_mm_fault > __do_page_fault > do_page_fault > page_fault Device mapper should be able to proceed if there is no available memory. If it doesn't proceed, there is a bug in it. I'd like to ask - what device mapper targets did you use in this case? Are there some other deadlocked processes? (show sysrq-t, sysrq-w when this happened) Did the machine lock up completely with that stacktrace, or was it just slowed down? > > Mempool users generally (except for some flawed cases like fs_bio_set) do > > not require memory to proceed. So if you just loop in mempool_alloc, the > > processes that exhasted the mempool reserve will eventually return objects > > to the mempool and you should proceed. > > > > That's obviously not the case if we have hundreds of machines timing out > after two hours waiting for that fault to succeed. The mempool interface > cannot require that users return elements to the pool synchronous with all > allocators so that we can happily loop forever, the only requirement on Mempool users must return objects to the mempool. > the interface is that mempool_alloc() must succeed. If the context of the > thread doing mempool_alloc() allows access to memory reserves, this will > always be allowed by the page allocator. This is not a mempool problem. Mikulas -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>