mm: vmscan: fix endless loop in kswapd balancing

Kswapd does not in all places have the same criteria for a balanced
zone.  Zones are only being reclaimed when their high watermark is
breached, but compaction checks loop over the zonelist again when the
zone does not meet the low watermark plus two times the size of the
allocation.  This gets kswapd stuck in an endless loop over a small
zone, like the DMA zone, where the high watermark is smaller than the
compaction requirement.

Add a function, zone_balanced(), that checks the watermark, and, for
higher order allocations, if compaction has enough free memory.  Then
use it uniformly to check for balanced zones.

This makes sure that when the compaction watermark is not met, at least
reclaim happens and progress is made - or the zone is declared
unreclaimable at some point and skipped entirely.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reported-by: George Spelvin <linux@horizon.com>
Reported-by: Johannes Hirte <johannes.hirte@fem.tu-ilmenau.de>
Reported-by: Tomas Racek <tracek@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Johannes Hirte <johannes.hirte@fem.tu-ilmenau.de>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 file changed