The patch titled Subject: mm, page_alloc: always use a captured page regardless of compaction result has been added to the -mm tree. Its filename is mm-page_alloc-always-use-a-captured-page-regardless-of-compaction-result.patch This patch should soon appear at http://ozlabs.org/~akpm/mmots/broken-out/mm-page_alloc-always-use-a-captured-page-regardless-of-compaction-result.patch and later at http://ozlabs.org/~akpm/mmotm/broken-out/mm-page_alloc-always-use-a-captured-page-regardless-of-compaction-result.patch Before you just go and hit "reply", please: a) Consider who else should be cc'ed b) Prefer to cc a suitable mailing list as well c) Ideally: find the original patch on the mailing list and do a reply-to-all to that, adding suitable additional cc's *** Remember to use Documentation/process/submit-checklist.rst when testing your code *** The -mm tree is included into linux-next and is updated there every 3-4 working days ------------------------------------------------------ From: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: mm, page_alloc: always use a captured page regardless of compaction result During the development of 5e1f0f098b46 ("mm, compaction: capture a page under direct compaction"), a paranoid check was added to ensure that if a captured page was available after compaction that it was consistent with the final state of compaction. The intent was to catch serious programming bugs such as using a stale page pointer and causing corruption problems. However, it is possible to get a captured page even if compaction was unsuccessful if an interrupt triggered and happened to free pages in interrupt context that got merged into a suitable high-order page. It's highly unlikely but Li Wang did report the following warning on s390 occuring when testing OOM handling. Note that the warning is slightly edited for clarity. [ 1422.124060] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 9783 at mm/page_alloc.c:3777 __alloc_pages_direct_compact+0x182/0x190 [ 1422.124065] Modules linked in: rpcsec_gss_krb5 auth_rpcgss nfsv4 dns_resolver nfs lockd grace fscache sunrpc pkey ghash_s390 prng xts aes_s390 des_s390 des_generic sha512_s390 zcrypt_cex4 zcrypt vmur binfmt_misc ip_tables xfs libcrc32c dasd_fba_mod qeth_l2 dasd_eckd_mod dasd_mod qeth qdio lcs ctcm ccwgroup fsm dm_mirror dm_region_hash dm_log dm_mod [ 1422.124086] CPU: 0 PID: 9783 Comm: copy.sh Kdump: loaded Not tainted 5.1.0-rc 5 #1 This patch simply removes the check entirely instead of trying to be clever about pages freed from interrupt context. If a serious programming error was introduced, it is highly likely to be caught by prep_new_page() instead. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190419085133.GH18914@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fixes: 5e1f0f098b46 ("mm, compaction: capture a page under direct compaction") Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Reported-by: Li Wang <liwang@xxxxxxxxxx> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- mm/page_alloc.c | 5 ----- 1 file changed, 5 deletions(-) --- a/mm/page_alloc.c~mm-page_alloc-always-use-a-captured-page-regardless-of-compaction-result +++ a/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -3786,11 +3786,6 @@ __alloc_pages_direct_compact(gfp_t gfp_m memalloc_noreclaim_restore(noreclaim_flag); psi_memstall_leave(&pflags); - if (*compact_result <= COMPACT_INACTIVE) { - WARN_ON_ONCE(page); - return NULL; - } - /* * At least in one zone compaction wasn't deferred or skipped, so let's * count a compaction stall _ Patches currently in -mm which might be from mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx are mm-do-not-boost-watermarks-to-avoid-fragmentation-for-the-discontig-memory-model.patch mm-page_alloc-always-use-a-captured-page-regardless-of-compaction-result.patch