From: Juergen Gross jgross@suse.com
commit e553f62f10d93551eb883eca227ac54d1a4fad84 upstream.
Since commit 6aa303defb74 ("mm, vmscan: only allocate and reclaim from zones with pages managed by the buddy allocator") only zones with free memory are included in a built zonelist. This is problematic when e.g. all memory of a zone has been ballooned out when zonelists are being rebuilt.
The decision whether to rebuild the zonelists when onlining new memory is done based on populated_zone() returning 0 for the zone the memory will be added to. The new zone is added to the zonelists only, if it has free memory pages (managed_zone() returns a non-zero value) after the memory has been onlined. This implies, that onlining memory will always free the added pages to the allocator immediately, but this is not true in all cases: when e.g. running as a Xen guest the onlined new memory will be added only to the ballooned memory list, it will be freed only when the guest is being ballooned up afterwards.
Another problem with using managed_zone() for the decision whether a zone is being added to the zonelists is, that a zone with all memory used will in fact be removed from all zonelists in case the zonelists happen to be rebuilt.
Use populated_zone() when building a zonelist as it has been done before that commit.
There was a report that QubesOS (based on Xen) is hitting this problem. Xen has switched to use the zone device functionality in kernel 5.9 and QubesOS wants to use memory hotplugging for guests in order to be able to start a guest with minimal memory and expand it as needed. This was the report leading to the patch.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220407120637.9035-1-jgross@suse.com Fixes: 6aa303defb74 ("mm, vmscan: only allocate and reclaim from zones with pages managed by the buddy allocator") Signed-off-by: Juergen Gross jgross@suse.com Reported-by: Marek Marczykowski-Górecki marmarek@invisiblethingslab.com Acked-by: Michal Hocko mhocko@suse.com Acked-by: David Hildenbrand david@redhat.com Cc: Marek Marczykowski-Górecki marmarek@invisiblethingslab.com Reviewed-by: Wei Yang richard.weiyang@gmail.com Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton akpm@linux-foundation.org Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh@linuxfoundation.org --- mm/page_alloc.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -4503,7 +4503,7 @@ static int build_zonelists_node(pg_data_ do { zone_type--; zone = pgdat->node_zones + zone_type; - if (managed_zone(zone)) { + if (populated_zone(zone)) { zoneref_set_zone(zone, &zonelist->_zonerefs[nr_zones++]); check_highest_zone(zone_type);