mm: warn about allocations which stall for too long

Currently we do warn only about allocation failures but small
allocations are basically nofail and they might loop in the page
allocator for a long time.  Especially when the reclaim cannot make any
progress - e.g.  GFP_NOFS cannot invoke the oom killer and rely on a
different context to make a forward progress in case there is a lot
memory used by filesystems.

Give us at least a clue when something like this happens and warn about
allocations which take more than 10s.  Print the basic allocation
context information along with the cumulative time spent in the
allocation as well as the allocation stack.  Repeat the warning after
every 10 seconds so that we know that the problem is permanent rather
than ephemeral.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160929084407.7004-3-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 5ab2e30a1006..ca423cc20b59 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -3493,6 +3493,8 @@ __alloc_pages_slowpath(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
 	enum compact_result compact_result;
 	int compaction_retries = 0;
 	int no_progress_loops = 0;
+	unsigned long alloc_start = jiffies;
+	unsigned int stall_timeout = 10 * HZ;
 
 	/*
 	 * In the slowpath, we sanity check order to avoid ever trying to
@@ -3648,6 +3650,14 @@ retry:
 	if (order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER && !(gfp_mask & __GFP_REPEAT))
 		goto nopage;
 
+	/* Make sure we know about allocations which stall for too long */
+	if (time_after(jiffies, alloc_start + stall_timeout)) {
+		warn_alloc(gfp_mask,
+			"page alloction stalls for %ums, order:%u\n",
+			jiffies_to_msecs(jiffies-alloc_start), order);
+		stall_timeout += 10 * HZ;
+	}
+
 	if (should_reclaim_retry(gfp_mask, order, ac, alloc_flags,
 				 did_some_progress > 0, &no_progress_loops))
 		goto retry;