c571686a92
This check was added by commit 82f71ae4a2b8 ("mm: catch memory
commitment underflow") in 2014 to have a safety check for issues which
have been fixed. And there has been few report caught by it, as
described in its commit log:
: This shouldn't happen any more - the previous two patches fixed
: the committed_as underflow issues.
But it was really found by Qian Cai when he used the LTP memory stress
suite to test a RFC patchset, which tries to improve scalability of
per-cpu counter 'vm_committed_as', by chosing a bigger 'batch' number for
loose overcommit policies (OVERCOMMIT_ALWAYS and OVERCOMMIT_GUESS), while
keeping current number for OVERCOMMIT_NEVER.
With that patchset, when system firstly uses a loose policy, the
'vm_committed_as' count could be a big negative value, as its big 'batch'
number allows a big deviation, then when the policy is changed to
OVERCOMMIT_NEVER, the 'batch' will be decreased to a much smaller value,
thus hits this WARN check.
To mitigate this, one proposed solution is to queue work on all online
CPUs to do a local sync for 'vm_committed_as' when changing policy to
OVERCOMMIT_NEVER, plus some global syncing to garante the case won't be
hit.
But this solution is costy and slow, given this check hasn't shown real
trouble or benefit, simply drop it from one hot path of MM. And perf
stats does show some tiny saving for removing it.
Reported-by: Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw>
Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Konstantin Khlebnikov <koct9i@gmail.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi.kleen@intel.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200603094804.GB89848@shbuild999.sh.intel.com
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.