On Fri 03-04-15 10:43:57, Nishanth Aravamudan wrote: > On 31.03.2015 [11:48:29 +0200], Michal Hocko wrote: [...] > > I would expect kswapd would be looping endlessly because the zone > > wouldn't be balanced obviously. But I would be wrong... because > > pgdat_balanced is doing this: > > /* > > * A special case here: > > * > > * balance_pgdat() skips over all_unreclaimable after > > * DEF_PRIORITY. Effectively, it considers them balanced so > > * they must be considered balanced here as well! > > */ > > if (!zone_reclaimable(zone)) { > > balanced_pages += zone->managed_pages; > > continue; > > } > > > > and zone_reclaimable is false for you as you didn't have any > > zone_reclaimable_pages(). But wakeup_kswapd doesn't do this check so it > > would see !zone_balanced() AFAICS (build_zonelists doesn't ignore those > > zones right?) and so the kswapd would be woken up easily. So it looks > > like a mess. > > My understanding, and I could easily be wrong, is that kswapd2 (node 2 > is the exhausted one) spins endlessly, because the reclaim logic sees > that we are reclaiming from somewhere but the allocation request for > node 2 (which is __GFP_THISNODE for hugepages, not GFP_THISNODE) will > never complete, so we just continue to reclaim. __GFP_THISNODE would be waking up kswapd2 again and again, that is true. I am just wondering whether we will have any __GFP_THISNODE allocations for a node without CPUs (numa_node_id() shouldn't return such a node AFAICS). Maybe if somebody is bound to Node2 explicitly but I would consider this as a misconfiguration. -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs -- 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>