Commit 78ebc2f7 authored by Tetsuo Handa's avatar Tetsuo Handa Committed by Linus Torvalds
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mm,writeback: don't use memory reserves for wb_start_writeback

When writeback operation cannot make forward progress because memory
allocation requests needed for doing I/O cannot be satisfied (e.g.
under OOM-livelock situation), we can observe flood of order-0 page
allocation failure messages caused by complete depletion of memory
reserves.

This is caused by unconditionally allocating "struct wb_writeback_work"
objects using GFP_ATOMIC from PF_MEMALLOC context.

__alloc_pages_nodemask() {
  __alloc_pages_slowpath() {
    __alloc_pages_direct_reclaim() {
      __perform_reclaim() {
        current->flags |= PF_MEMALLOC;
        try_to_free_pages() {
          do_try_to_free_pages() {
            wakeup_flusher_threads() {
              wb_start_writeback() {
                kzalloc(sizeof(*work), GFP_ATOMIC) {
                  /* ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS via PF_MEMALLOC */
                }
              }
            }
          }
        }
        current->flags &= ~PF_MEMALLOC;
      }
    }
  }
}

Since ...
parent 89474d50
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