mm,page_alloc: PF_WQ_WORKER threads must sleep at should_reclaim_retry()

Tetsuo Handa has reported that it is possible to bypass the short sleep
for PF_WQ_WORKER threads which was introduced by commit 373ccbe
("mm, vmstat: allow WQ concurrency to discover memory reclaim doesn't make
any progress") and lock up the system if OOM.

The primary reason is that WQ_MEM_RECLAIM WQs are not guaranteed to run
even when they have a rescuer available.  Those workers might be essential
for reclaim to make a forward progress, however.  If we are too unlucky
all the allocations requests can get stuck waiting for a WQ_MEM_RECLAIM
work item and the system is essentially stuck in an OOM condition without
much hope to move on.  Tetsuo has seen the reclaim stuck on
drain_local_pages_wq or xlog_cil_push_work (xfs).  There might be others.

Since should_reclaim_retry() should be a natural reschedule point,
let's do the short sleep for PF_WQ_WORKER threads unconditionally in
order to guarantee that other pending work items are started.  This
will workaround this problem and it is less fragile than hunting down
when the sleep is missed.  Having a single sleeping point is more
robust.

[[email protected]: reflow comment to 80 cols to save a couple of lines]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Debugged-by: Tetsuo Handa <[email protected]>
Reported-by: Tetsuo Handa <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <[email protected]>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>
Cc: Vladimir Davydov <[email protected]>
Cc: David Rientjes <[email protected]>
Cc: Tejun Heo <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

mm/page_alloc.c

@@ -3922,6 +3922,7 @@ should_reclaim_retry(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned order,
 {
 	struct zone *zone;
 	struct zoneref *z;
+	bool ret = false;
 
 	/*
 	 * Costly allocations might have made a progress but this doesn't mean
@@ -3985,25 +3986,24 @@ should_reclaim_retry(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned order,
 				}
 			}
 
-			/*
-			 * Memory allocation/reclaim might be called from a WQ
-			 * context and the current implementation of the WQ
-			 * concurrency control doesn't recognize that
-			 * a particular WQ is congested if the worker thread is
-			 * looping without ever sleeping. Therefore we have to
-			 * do a short sleep here rather than calling
-			 * cond_resched().
-			 */
-			if (current->flags & PF_WQ_WORKER)
-				schedule_timeout_uninterruptible(1);
-			else
-				cond_resched();
-
-			return true;
+			ret = true;
+			goto out;
 		}
 	}
 
-	return false;
+out:
+	/*
+	 * Memory allocation/reclaim might be called from a WQ context and the
+	 * current implementation of the WQ concurrency control doesn't
+	 * recognize that a particular WQ is congested if the worker thread is
+	 * looping without ever sleeping. Therefore we have to do a short sleep
+	 * here rather than calling cond_resched().
+	 */
+	if (current->flags & PF_WQ_WORKER)
+		schedule_timeout_uninterruptible(1);
+	else
+		cond_resched();
+	return ret;
 }
 
 static inline bool