mm: page allocator: calculate a better estimate of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory is low and kswapd is awake

Ordinarily watermark checks are based on the vmstat NR_FREE_PAGES as it is
cheaper than scanning a number of lists.  To avoid synchronization
overhead, counter deltas are maintained on a per-cpu basis and drained
both periodically and when the delta is above a threshold.  On large CPU
systems, the difference between the estimated and real value of
NR_FREE_PAGES can be very high.  If NR_FREE_PAGES is much higher than
number of real free page in buddy, the VM can allocate pages below min
watermark, at worst reducing the real number of pages to zero.  Even if
the OOM killer kills some victim for freeing memory, it may not free
memory if the exit path requires a new page resulting in livelock.

This patch introduces a zone_page_state_snapshot() function (courtesy of
Christoph) that takes a slightly more accurate view of an arbitrary vmstat
counter.  It is used to read NR_FREE_PAGES while kswapd is awake to avoid
the watermark being accidentally broken.  The estimate is not perfect and
may result in cache line bounces but is expected to be lighter than the
IPI calls necessary to continually drain the per-cpu counters while kswapd
is awake.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 22 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/vmstat.h b/include/linux/vmstat.h
index 7f43ccdc1d38..eaaea37b3b75 100644
--- a/include/linux/vmstat.h
+++ b/include/linux/vmstat.h
@@ -170,6 +170,28 @@ static inline unsigned long zone_page_state(struct zone *zone,
         return x;
 }
 
+/*
+ * More accurate version that also considers the currently pending
+ * deltas. For that we need to loop over all cpus to find the current
+ * deltas. There is no synchronization so the result cannot be
+ * exactly accurate either.
+ */
+static inline unsigned long zone_page_state_snapshot(struct zone *zone,
+                                        enum zone_stat_item item)
+{
+        long x = atomic_long_read(&zone->vm_stat[item]);
+
+#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
+        int cpu;
+        for_each_online_cpu(cpu)
+                x += per_cpu_ptr(zone->pageset, cpu)->vm_stat_diff[item];
+
+        if (x < 0)
+                x = 0;
+#endif
+        return x;
+}
+
 extern unsigned long global_reclaimable_pages(void);
 extern unsigned long zone_reclaimable_pages(struct zone *zone);