Re: [PATCH v2] mm, page_alloc: fix build_zonerefs_node()

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On 08.04.22 00:44, Andrew Morton wrote:
On Thu,  7 Apr 2022 14:06:37 +0200 Juergen Gross <jgross@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Since commit 6aa303defb74 ("mm, vmscan: only allocate and reclaim from
zones with pages managed by the buddy allocator")

Six years ago!

only zones with free
memory are included in a built zonelist. This is problematic when e.g.
all memory of a zone has been ballooned out when zonelists are being
rebuilt.

The decision whether to rebuild the zonelists when onlining new memory
is done based on populated_zone() returning 0 for the zone the memory
will be added to. The new zone is added to the zonelists only, if it
has free memory pages (managed_zone() returns a non-zero value) after
the memory has been onlined. This implies, that onlining memory will
always free the added pages to the allocator immediately, but this is
not true in all cases: when e.g. running as a Xen guest the onlined
new memory will be added only to the ballooned memory list, it will be
freed only when the guest is being ballooned up afterwards.

Another problem with using managed_zone() for the decision whether a
zone is being added to the zonelists is, that a zone with all memory
used will in fact be removed from all zonelists in case the zonelists
happen to be rebuilt.

Use populated_zone() when building a zonelist as it has been done
before that commit.

Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Some details, please.  Is this really serious enough to warrant
backporting?  Is some new workload/usage pattern causing people to hit
this?

Yes. There was a report that QubesOS (based on Xen) is hitting this
problem. Xen has switched to use the zone device functionality in
kernel 5.9 and QubesOS wants to use memory hotplugging for guests in
order to be able to start a guest with minimal memory and expand it
as needed. This was the report leading to the patch.


Juergen

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