rcu: Back off upon fill_page_cache_func() allocation failure

The fill_page_cache_func() function allocates couple of pages to store
kvfree_rcu_bulk_data structures. This is a lightweight (GFP_NORETRY)
allocation which can fail under memory pressure. The function will,
however keep retrying even when the previous attempt has failed.

This retrying is in theory correct, but in practice the allocation is
invoked from workqueue context, which means that if the memory reclaim
gets stuck, these retries can hog the worker for quite some time.
Although the workqueues subsystem automatically adjusts concurrency, such
adjustment is not guaranteed to happen until the worker context sleeps.
And the fill_page_cache_func() function's retry loop is not guaranteed
to sleep (see the should_reclaim_retry() function).

And we have seen this function cause workqueue lockups:

kernel: BUG: workqueue lockup - pool cpus=93 node=1 flags=0x1 nice=0 stuck for 32s!
[...]
kernel: pool 74: cpus=37 node=0 flags=0x1 nice=0 hung=32s workers=2 manager: 2146
kernel:   pwq 498: cpus=249 node=1 flags=0x1 nice=0 active=4/256 refcnt=5
kernel:     in-flight: 1917:fill_page_cache_func
kernel:     pending: dbs_work_handler, free_work, kfree_rcu_monitor

Originally, we thought that the root cause of this lockup was several
retries with direct reclaim, but this is not yet confirmed.  Furthermore,
we have seen similar lockups without any heavy memory pressure.  This
suggests that there are other factors contributing to these lockups.
However, it is not really clear that endless retries are desireable.

So let's make the fill_page_cache_func() function back off after
allocation failure.

Cc: Uladzislau Rezki (Sony) <urezki@gmail.com>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
Cc: Neeraj Upadhyay <quic_neeraju@quicinc.com>
Cc: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Cc: Lai Jiangshan <jiangshanlai@gmail.com>
Cc: Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Uladzislau Rezki (Sony) <urezki@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 8 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/rcu/tree.c b/kernel/rcu/tree.c
index 79aea7df4345..eb435941e92f 100644
--- a/kernel/rcu/tree.c
+++ b/kernel/rcu/tree.c
@@ -3183,15 +3183,16 @@ static void fill_page_cache_func(struct work_struct *work)
 		bnode = (struct kvfree_rcu_bulk_data *)
 			__get_free_page(GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_NOMEMALLOC | __GFP_NOWARN);
 
-		if (bnode) {
-			raw_spin_lock_irqsave(&krcp->lock, flags);
-			pushed = put_cached_bnode(krcp, bnode);
-			raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore(&krcp->lock, flags);
+		if (!bnode)
+			break;
 
-			if (!pushed) {
-				free_page((unsigned long) bnode);
-				break;
-			}
+		raw_spin_lock_irqsave(&krcp->lock, flags);
+		pushed = put_cached_bnode(krcp, bnode);
+		raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore(&krcp->lock, flags);
+
+		if (!pushed) {
+			free_page((unsigned long) bnode);
+			break;
 		}
 	}