On 03.04.2015 [20:24:45 +0200], Michal Hocko wrote: > 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. Right, one idea I had for this was ensuring that we perform reclaim with somehow some knowledge of __GFP_THISNODE -- that is it needs to be somewhat targetted in order to actually help satisfy the current allocation. But it got pretty hairy fast and I didn't want to break the world :) > 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. Right, I'd need to check what happens if in our setup you taskset to node2 and tried to force memory to be local -- I think you'd either be killed immediately, or the kernel will just disagree with your binding since it's invalid (e.g., that will happen if you try to bind to a memoryless node, I think). Keep in mind that although in my config node2 had no CPUs, that's not a hard & fast requirement. I do believe in a previous iteration of this bug, the exhausted node had no free memory but did have cpus assigned to it. -Nish -- 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>