Commit b0320c7b7d1ac1bd5c2d9dff3258524ab39bad32

Authored by Rafael Aquini
Committed by Linus Torvalds
1 parent 959ecc48fc

mm: fix negative commitlimit when gigantic hugepages are allocated

When 1GB hugepages are allocated on a system, free(1) reports less
available memory than what really is installed in the box.  Also, if the
total size of hugepages allocated on a system is over half of the total
memory size, CommitLimit becomes a negative number.

The problem is that gigantic hugepages (order > MAX_ORDER) can only be
allocated at boot with bootmem, thus its frames are not accounted to
'totalram_pages'.  However, they are accounted to hugetlb_total_pages()

What happens to turn CommitLimit into a negative number is this
calculation, in fs/proc/meminfo.c:

        allowed = ((totalram_pages - hugetlb_total_pages())
                * sysctl_overcommit_ratio / 100) + total_swap_pages;

A similar calculation occurs in __vm_enough_memory() in mm/mmap.c.

Also, every vm statistic which depends on 'totalram_pages' will render
confusing values, as if system were 'missing' some part of its memory.

Impact of this bug:

When gigantic hugepages are allocated and sysctl_overcommit_memory ==
OVERCOMMIT_NEVER.  In a such situation, __vm_enough_memory() goes through
the mentioned 'allowed' calculation and might end up mistakenly returning
-ENOMEM, thus forcing the system to start reclaiming pages earlier than it
would be ususal, and this could cause detrimental impact to overall
system's performance, depending on the workload.

Besides the aforementioned scenario, I can only think of this causing
annoyances with memory reports from /proc/meminfo and free(1).

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: standardize comment layout]
Reported-by: Russ Anderson <rja@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@linux.com>
Acked-by: Russ Anderson <rja@sgi.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

Showing 1 changed file with 8 additions and 0 deletions Side-by-side Diff

... ... @@ -1111,6 +1111,14 @@
1111 1111 WARN_ON(page_count(page) != 1);
1112 1112 prep_compound_huge_page(page, h->order);
1113 1113 prep_new_huge_page(h, page, page_to_nid(page));
  1114 + /*
  1115 + * If we had gigantic hugepages allocated at boot time, we need
  1116 + * to restore the 'stolen' pages to totalram_pages in order to
  1117 + * fix confusing memory reports from free(1) and another
  1118 + * side-effects, like CommitLimit going negative.
  1119 + */
  1120 + if (h->order > (MAX_ORDER - 1))
  1121 + totalram_pages += 1 << h->order;
1114 1122 }
1115 1123 }
1116 1124