tree 64bbe3b415bdfc151dc44f6b4c216c65351eb53c
parent 938929f14cb595f43cd1a4e63e22d36cab1e4a1f
author Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> 1326236835 -0800
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1326241842 -0800

mm: avoid livelock on !__GFP_FS allocations

Colin Cross reported;

  Under the following conditions, __alloc_pages_slowpath can loop forever:
  gfp_mask & __GFP_WAIT is true
  gfp_mask & __GFP_FS is false
  reclaim and compaction make no progress
  order <= PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER

  These conditions happen very often during suspend and resume,
  when pm_restrict_gfp_mask() effectively converts all GFP_KERNEL
  allocations into __GFP_WAIT.

  The oom killer is not run because gfp_mask & __GFP_FS is false,
  but should_alloc_retry will always return true when order is less
  than PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER.

In his fix, he avoided retrying the allocation if reclaim made no progress
and __GFP_FS was not set.  The problem is that this would result in
GFP_NOIO allocations failing that previously succeeded which would be very
unfortunate.

The big difference between GFP_NOIO and suspend converting GFP_KERNEL to
behave like GFP_NOIO is that normally flushers will be cleaning pages and
kswapd reclaims pages allowing GFP_NOIO to succeed after a short delay.
The same does not necessarily apply during suspend as the storage device
may be suspended.

This patch special cases the suspend case to fail the page allocation if
reclaim cannot make progress and adds some documentation on how
gfp_allowed_mask is currently used.  Failing allocations like this may
cause suspend to abort but that is better than a livelock.

[mgorman@suse.de: Rework fix to be suspend specific]
[rientjes@google.com: Move suspended device check to should_alloc_retry]
Reported-by: Colin Cross <ccross@android.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>