We had a report about strange OOM killer strikes on a PPC machine although there was a lot of swap free and a tons of anonymous memory which could be swapped out. In the end it turned out that the OOM was a side effect of zone reclaim which wasn't doesn't unmap and swapp out and so the system was pushed to the OOM. Although this sounds like a bug somewhere in the kswapd vs. zone reclaim vs. direct reclaim interaction numactl on the said hardware suggests that the zone reclaim should have been set in the first place: node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 node 0 size: 0 MB node 0 free: 0 MB node 2 cpus: node 2 size: 7168 MB node 2 free: 6019 MB node distances: node 0 2 0: 10 40 2: 40 10 So all the CPUs are associated with Node0 which doesn't have any memory while Node2 contains all the available memory. Node distances cause an automatic zone_reclaim_mode enabling. Zone reclaim is intended to keep the allocations local but this doesn't make any sense on the memory less nodes. So let's exclude such nodes for init_zone_allows_reclaim which evaluates zone reclaim behavior and suitable reclaim_nodes. Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxx> Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx> Acked-by: Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Tested-by: Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- mm/page_alloc.c | 5 +++-- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c index 3e953f07edb0..fafb9e24e87f 100644 --- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -1855,7 +1855,7 @@ static void __paginginit init_zone_allows_reclaim(int nid) { int i; - for_each_online_node(i) + for_each_node_state(i, N_MEMORY) if (node_distance(nid, i) <= RECLAIM_DISTANCE) node_set(i, NODE_DATA(nid)->reclaim_nodes); else @@ -4901,7 +4901,8 @@ void __paginginit free_area_init_node(int nid, unsigned long *zones_size, pgdat->node_id = nid; pgdat->node_start_pfn = node_start_pfn; - init_zone_allows_reclaim(nid); + if (node_state(nid, N_MEMORY)) + init_zone_allows_reclaim(nid); #ifdef CONFIG_HAVE_MEMBLOCK_NODE_MAP get_pfn_range_for_nid(nid, &start_pfn, &end_pfn); #endif -- 1.9.0.rc3 -- 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>