mm: page allocator: drain per-cpu lists after direct reclaim allocation fails
authorMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Thu, 9 Sep 2010 23:38:18 +0000 (16:38 -0700)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:21:33 +0000 (17:21 -0700)
commit9fad902072e4689c9179b326669aac8918920e5c
treeb7630ac3caa96b802df1e0e498d14eed7e0c4cb6
parentc5b75362daff6a41168e6bf848d745763be99a21
mm: page allocator: drain per-cpu lists after direct reclaim allocation fails

commit 9ee493ce0a60bf42c0f8fd0b0fe91df5704a1cbf upstream.

When under significant memory pressure, a process enters direct reclaim
and immediately afterwards tries to allocate a page.  If it fails and no
further progress is made, it's possible the system will go OOM.  However,
on systems with large amounts of memory, it's possible that a significant
number of pages are on per-cpu lists and inaccessible to the calling
process.  This leads to a process entering direct reclaim more often than
it should increasing the pressure on the system and compounding the
problem.

This patch notes that if direct reclaim is making progress but allocations
are still failing that the system is already under heavy pressure.  In
this case, it drains the per-cpu lists and tries the allocation a second
time before continuing.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
mm/page_alloc.c