mm/vmscan.c: avoid possible deadlock caused by too_many_isolated() Neil found that if too_many_isolated() returns true while performing direct reclaim we can end up waiting for other threads to complete their direct reclaim. If those threads are allowed to enter the FS or IO to free memory, but this thread is not, then it is possible that those threads will be waiting on this thread and so we get a circular deadlock.

some task enters direct reclaim with GFP_KERNEL
  => too_many_isolated() false
    => vmscan and run into dirty pages
      => pageout()
        => take some FS lock
          => fs/block code does GFP_NOIO allocation
            => enter direct reclaim again
              => too_many_isolated() true
                => waiting for others to progress, however the other
                   tasks may be circular waiting for the FS lock..

The fix is to let !__GFP_IO and !__GFP_FS direct reclaims enjoy higher
priority than normal ones, by lowering the throttle threshold for the
latter.

Allowing ~1/8 isolated pages in normal is large enough.  For example, for
a 1GB LRU list, that's ~128MB isolated pages, or 1k blocked tasks (each
isolates 32 4KB pages), or 64 blocked tasks per logical CPU (assuming 16
logical CPUs per NUMA node).  So it's not likely some CPU goes idle
waiting (when it could make progress) because of this limit: there are
much more sleeping reclaim tasks than the number of CPU, so the task may
well be blocked by some low level queue/lock anyway.

Now !GFP_IOFS reclaims won't be waiting for GFP_IOFS reclaims to progress.
 They will be blocked only when there are too many concurrent !GFP_IOFS
reclaims, however that's very unlikely because the IO-less direct reclaims
is able to progress much more faster, and they won't deadlock each other.
The threshold is raised high enough for them, so that there can be
sufficient parallel progress of !GFP_IOFS reclaims.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak comment]
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Torsten Kaiser <just.for.lkml@googlemail.com>
Tested-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
vmscan: comment too_many_isolated() Comment "Why it's doing so" rather than "What it does" as proposed by Andrew Morton.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm: Do not stall in synchronous compaction for THP allocations Changelog since V1 o Update changelog with more detail o Add comment on __GFP_NO_KSWAPD

Occasionally during large file copies to slow storage, there are still
reports of user-visible stalls when THP is enabled. Reports on this
have been intermittent and not reliable to reproduce locally but;

Andy Isaacson reported a problem copying to VFAT on SD Card
	https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/7/2

	In this case, it was stuck in munmap for betwen 20 and 60
	seconds in compaction. It is also possible that khugepaged
	was holding mmap_sem on this process if CONFIG_NUMA was set.

Johannes Weiner reported stalls on USB
	https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/25/378

	In this case, there is no stack trace but it looks like the
	same problem. The USB stick may have been using NTFS as a
	filesystem based on other work done related to writing back
	to USB around the same time.

Internally in SUSE, I received a bug report related to stalls in firefox
	when using Java and Flash heavily while copying from NFS
	to VFAT on USB. It has not been confirmed to be the same problem
	but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....

In the past, commit [11bc82d6: mm: compaction: Use async migration for
__GFP_NO_KSWAPD and enforce no writeback] forced that sync compaction
would never be used for THP allocations. This was reverted in commit
[c6a140bf: mm/compaction: reverse the change that forbade sync
migraton with __GFP_NO_KSWAPD] on the grounds that it was uncertain
it was beneficial.

While user-visible stalls do not happen for me when writing to USB,
I setup a test running postmark while short-lived processes created
anonymous mapping. The objective was to exercise the paths that
allocate transparent huge pages. I then logged when processes were
stalled for more than 1 second, recorded a stack strace and did some
analysis to aggregate unique "stall events" which revealed

Time stalled in this event:    47369 ms
Event count:                      20
usemem               sleep_on_page          3690 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          2148 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1534 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1518 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1225 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          2205 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          2399 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          2398 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          3760 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1861 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          2948 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1515 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1386 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1882 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1850 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          3715 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          3716 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          4846 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1306 ms
usemem               sleep_on_page          1467 ms
[<ffffffff810ef30c>] wait_on_page_bit+0x6c/0x80
[<ffffffff8113de9f>] unmap_and_move+0x1bf/0x360
[<ffffffff8113e0e2>] migrate_pages+0xa2/0x1b0
[<ffffffff81134273>] compact_zone+0x1f3/0x2f0
[<ffffffff811345d8>] compact_zone_order+0xa8/0xf0
[<ffffffff811346ff>] try_to_compact_pages+0xdf/0x110
[<ffffffff810f773a>] __alloc_pages_direct_compact+0xda/0x1a0
[<ffffffff810f7d5d>] __alloc_pages_slowpath+0x55d/0x7a0
[<ffffffff810f8151>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x1b1/0x1c0
[<ffffffff811331db>] alloc_pages_vma+0x9b/0x160
[<ffffffff81142bb0>] do_huge_pmd_anonymous_page+0x160/0x270
[<ffffffff814410a7>] do_page_fault+0x207/0x4c0
[<ffffffff8143dde5>] page_fault+0x25/0x30

The stall times are approximate at best but the estimates represent 25%
of the worst stalls and even if the estimates are off by a factor of
10, it's severe.

This patch once again prevents sync migration for transparent
hugepage allocations as it is preferable to fail a THP allocation
than stall.

It was suggested that __GFP_NORETRY be used instead of __GFP_NO_KSWAPD
to look less like a special case. This would prevent THP allocation
using sync compaction but it would have other side-effects. There are
existing users of __GFP_NORETRY that are doing high-order allocations
and while they can handle allocation failure, it seems reasonable that
they continue to use sync compaction unless there is a deliberate
reason to change that. To help clarify this for the future, this
patch updates the comment for __GFP_NO_KSWAPD.

If accepted, this is a -stable candidate.

Reported-by: Andy Isaacson <adi@hexapodia.org>
Reported-and-tested-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
time: cast ->raw_interval to u64 to avoid shift overflow We fixed a bunch of integer overflows in timekeeping code during the 3.6 cycle. I did an audit based on that and found this potential overflow.

Signed-off-by: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>
backported from Linux 3.6+ to Tuna Hybrid kernel by faux123
ipv4: save cpu cycles from check_leaf() - Backport from linux 3.8
fs/buffer.c: remove redundant initialization in alloc_page_buffers() buffer_head comes from kmem_cache_zalloc(), no need to zero its fields.

Signed-off-by: Yan Hong <clouds.yan@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm: Correct writeback tweak when screen ON
procfs: add num_to_str() to speed up /proc/stat == stat_check.py num = 0 with open("/proc/stat") as f: while num < 1000 : data = f.read() f.seek(0, 0) num = num + 1 ==

perf shows

    20.39%  stat_check.py  [kernel.kallsyms]    [k] format_decode
    13.41%  stat_check.py  [kernel.kallsyms]    [k] number
    12.61%  stat_check.py  [kernel.kallsyms]    [k] vsnprintf
    10.85%  stat_check.py  [kernel.kallsyms]    [k] memcpy
     4.85%  stat_check.py  [kernel.kallsyms]    [k] radix_tree_lookup
     4.43%  stat_check.py  [kernel.kallsyms]    [k] seq_printf

This patch removes most of calls to vsnprintf() by adding num_to_str()
and seq_print_decimal_ull(), which prints decimal numbers without rich
functions provided by printf().

On my 8cpu box.
== Before patch ==
[root@bluextal test]# time ./stat_check.py

real    0m0.150s
user    0m0.026s
sys     0m0.121s

== After patch ==
[root@bluextal test]# time ./stat_check.py

real    0m0.055s
user    0m0.022s
sys     0m0.030s

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: remove incorrect comment, use less statck in num_to_str(), move comment from .h to .c, simplify seq_put_decimal_ull()]
[andrea@betterlinux.com: avoid breaking the ABI in /proc/stat]
Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea@betterlinux.com>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Cc: Glauber Costa <glommer@parallels.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>
Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
backported from Linux 3.4-rc4 to Linux 3.0.x by faux123
Backport AIO from Linux 3.6.x