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authorMartin Bligh <mbligh@mbligh.org>2006-10-28 10:38:24 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org>2006-10-28 11:30:50 -0700
commit3bb1a852ab6c9cdf211a2f4a2f502340c8c38eca (patch)
treed08aa652e8eb40c47d5bc37fa1a240b4fb7db029 /mm/page_alloc.c
parent2ae88149a27cadf2840e0ab8155bef13be285c03 (diff)
[PATCH] vmscan: Fix temp_priority race
The temp_priority field in zone is racy, as we can walk through a reclaim path, and just before we copy it into prev_priority, it can be overwritten (say with DEF_PRIORITY) by another reclaimer. The same bug is contained in both try_to_free_pages and balance_pgdat, but it is fixed slightly differently. In balance_pgdat, we keep a separate priority record per zone in a local array. In try_to_free_pages there is no need to do this, as the priority level is the same for all zones that we reclaim from. Impact of this bug is that temp_priority is copied into prev_priority, and setting this artificially high causes reclaimers to set distress artificially low. They then fail to reclaim mapped pages, when they are, in fact, under severe memory pressure (their priority may be as low as 0). This causes the OOM killer to fire incorrectly. From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> __zone_reclaim() isn't modifying zone->prev_priority. But zone->prev_priority is used in the decision whether or not to bring mapped pages onto the inactive list. Hence there's a risk here that __zone_reclaim() will fail because zone->prev_priority ir large (ie: low urgency) and lots of mapped pages end up stuck on the active list. Fix that up by decreasing (ie making more urgent) zone->prev_priority as __zone_reclaim() scans the zone's pages. This bug perhaps explains why ZONE_RECLAIM_PRIORITY was created. It should be possible to remove that now, and to just start out at DEF_PRIORITY? Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm/page_alloc.c')
-rw-r--r--mm/page_alloc.c2
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index f5fc45472d5..ecf853b5e30 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -2407,7 +2407,7 @@ static void __meminit free_area_init_core(struct pglist_data *pgdat,
zone->zone_pgdat = pgdat;
zone->free_pages = 0;
- zone->temp_priority = zone->prev_priority = DEF_PRIORITY;
+ zone->prev_priority = DEF_PRIORITY;
zone_pcp_init(zone);
INIT_LIST_HEAD(&zone->active_list);