There have been some 3.7-rc reports of vm issues, including some kswapd
bugs and, more importantly, some memory "leaks":
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg46187.htmlhttps://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50181
Commit 1fb3f8ca0e ("mm: compaction: capture a suitable high-order page
immediately when it is made available") took split_free_page() and
reused it for the compaction code. It does something curious with
capture_free_page() (previously known as split_free_page()):
int capture_free_page(struct page *page, int alloc_order,
...
__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES, -(1UL << order));
- /* Split into individual pages */
- set_page_refcounted(page);
- split_page(page, order);
+ if (alloc_order != order)
+ expand(zone, page, alloc_order, order,
+ &zone->free_area[order], migratetype);
Note that expand() puts the pages _back_ in the allocator, but it does
not bump NR_FREE_PAGES. We "return" 'alloc_order' worth of pages, but
we accounted for removing 'order' in the __mod_zone_page_state() call.
For the old split_page()-style use (order==alloc_order) the bug will not
trigger. But, when called from the compaction code where we
occasionally get a larger page out of the buddy allocator than we need,
we will run in to this.
This patch simply changes the NR_FREE_PAGES manipulation to the correct
'alloc_order' instead of 'order'.
I've been able to repeatedly trigger this in my testing environment.
The amount "leaked" very closely tracks the imbalance I see in buddy
pages vs. NR_FREE_PAGES. I have confirmed that this patch fixes the
imbalance
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Dave Hansen