Re: [PATCH] page_frag: Recover from memory pressure

[Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>]

On 11/9/20 3:32 PM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 05, 2020 at 02:02:24PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 05, 2020 at 02:21:25PM +0100, Eric Dumazet wrote:
>>> On 11/5/20 5:21 AM, Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) wrote:
>>>> When the machine is under extreme memory pressure, the page_frag allocator
>>>> signals this to the networking stack by marking allocations with the
>>>> 'pfmemalloc' flag, which causes non-essential packets to be dropped.
>>>> Unfortunately, even after the machine recovers from the low memory
>>>> condition, the page continues to be used by the page_frag allocator,
>>>> so all allocations from this page will continue to be dropped.
>>>>
>>>> Fix this by freeing and re-allocating the page instead of recycling it.
>>>>
>>>> Reported-by: Dongli Zhang <dongli.zhang@oracle.com>
>>>> Cc: Aruna Ramakrishna <aruna.ramakrishna@oracle.com>
>>>> Cc: Bert Barbe <bert.barbe@oracle.com>
>>>> Cc: Rama Nichanamatlu <rama.nichanamatlu@oracle.com>
>>>> Cc: Venkat Venkatsubra <venkat.x.venkatsubra@oracle.com>
>>>> Cc: Manjunath Patil <manjunath.b.patil@oracle.com>
>>>> Cc: Joe Jin <joe.jin@oracle.com>
>>>> Cc: SRINIVAS <srinivas.eeda@oracle.com>
>>>> Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
>>>> Fixes: 79930f5892e ("net: do not deplete pfmemalloc reserve")
>>>
>>> Your patch looks fine, although this Fixes: tag seems incorrect.
>>>
>>> 79930f5892e ("net: do not deplete pfmemalloc reserve") was propagating
>>> the page pfmemalloc status into the skb, and seems correct to me.
>>>
>>> The bug was the page_frag_alloc() was keeping a problematic page for
>>> an arbitrary period of time ?
>>
>> Isn't this the commit which unmasks the problem, though?  I don't think
>> it's the buggy commit, but if your tree doesn't have 79930f5892e, then
>> you don't need this patch.
>>
>> Or are you saying the problem dates back all the way to
>> c93bdd0e03e8 ("netvm: allow skb allocation to use PFMEMALLOC reserves")
>>
>>>> +		if (nc->pfmemalloc) {
>>>
>>>                 if (unlikely(nc->pfmemalloc)) {
>>
>> ACK.  Will make the change once we've settled on an appropriate Fixes tag.
> 
> Which commit should I claim this fixes?

Hmm, no big deal, lets not waste time on tracking precise bug origin.