Commit 6e543d57 authored by Lisa Du's avatar Lisa Du Committed by Linus Torvalds
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mm: vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages() livelock

This patch is based on KOSAKI's work and I add a little more description,
please refer https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/14/74.

Currently, I found system can enter a state that there are lots of free
pages in a zone but only order-0 and order-1 pages which means the zone is
heavily fragmented, then high order allocation could make direct reclaim
path's long stall(ex, 60 seconds) especially in no swap and no compaciton
enviroment.  This problem happened on v3.4, but it seems issue still lives
in current tree, the reason is do_try_to_free_pages enter live lock:

kswapd will go to sleep if the zones have been fully scanned and are still
not balanced.  As kswapd thinks there's little point trying all over again
to avoid infinite loop.  Instead it changes order from high-order to
0-order because kswapd think order-0 is the most important.  Look at
73ce02e9 in detail.  If watermarks are ok, kswapd will go back to sleep
and may leave zone->all_unreclaimable =3D 0.  It ...
parent 7a8010cd
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