mm: throttle direct reclaimers if PF_MEMALLOC reserves are low and swap is backed by network storage

If swap is backed by network storage such as NBD, there is a risk that a
large number of reclaimers can hang the system by consuming all
PF_MEMALLOC reserves.  To avoid these hangs, the administrator must tune
min_free_kbytes in advance which is a bit fragile.

This patch throttles direct reclaimers if half the PF_MEMALLOC reserves
are in use.  If the system is routinely getting throttled the system
administrator can increase min_free_kbytes so degradation is smoother but
the system will keep running.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Christie <michaelc@cs.wisc.edu>
Cc: Eric B Munson <emunson@mgebm.net>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mmzone.h b/include/linux/mmzone.h
index 64b2c3a48286..2daa54f55db7 100644
--- a/include/linux/mmzone.h
+++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h
@@ -705,6 +705,7 @@ typedef struct pglist_data {
                                              range, including holes */
         int node_id;
         wait_queue_head_t kswapd_wait;
+        wait_queue_head_t pfmemalloc_wait;
         struct task_struct *kswapd;     /* Protected by lock_memory_hotplug() */
         int kswapd_max_order;
         enum zone_type classzone_idx;