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dcache: account external names as indirectly reclaimable memory
I received a report about suspicious growth of unreclaimable slabs on some machines. I've found that it happens on machines with low memory pressure, and these unreclaimable slabs are external names attached to dentries. External names are allocated using generic kmalloc() function, so they are accounted as unreclaimable. But they are held by dentries, which are reclaimable, and they will be reclaimed under the memory pressure. In particular, this breaks MemAvailable calculation, as it doesn't take unreclaimable slabs into account. This leads to a silly situation, when a machine is almost idle, has no memory pressure and therefore has a big dentry cache. And the resulting MemAvailable is too low to start a new workload. To address the issue, the NR_INDIRECTLY_RECLAIMABLE_BYTES counter is used to track the amount of memory, consumed by external names. The counter is increased in the dentry allocation path, if an external name structure is allocated; and it's decreased in the dentry freeing path. To reproduce the problem I've used the following Python script: import os for iter in range (0, 10000000): try: name = ("/some_long_name_%d" % iter) + "_" * 220 os.stat(name) except Exception: pass Without this patch: $ cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemAvailable MemAvailable: 7811688 kB $ python indirect.py $ cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemAvailable MemAvailable: 2753052 kB With the patch: $ cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemAvailable MemAvailable: 7809516 kB $ python indirect.py $ cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemAvailable MemAvailable: 7749144 kB [[email protected]: fix indirectly reclaimable memory accounting for CONFIG_SLOB] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected] [[email protected]: fix indirectly reclaimable memory accounting] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected] Signed-off-by: Roman Gushchin <[email protected]> Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]> Cc: Alexander Viro <[email protected]> Cc: Michal Hocko <[email protected]> Cc: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]> Cc: Mel Gorman <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
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