drain_all_pages backs off when called from a kworker context since
commit
0ccce3b92421 ("mm, page_alloc: drain per-cpu pages from workqueue
context") because the original IPI based pcp draining has been replaced
by a WQ based one and the check wanted to prevent from recursion and
inter workers dependencies. This has made some sense at the time
because the system WQ has been used and one worker holding the lock
could be blocked while waiting for new workers to emerge which can be a
problem under OOM conditions.
Since then commit
ce612879ddc7 ("mm: move pcp and lru-pcp draining into
single wq") has moved draining to a dedicated (mm_percpu_wq) WQ with a
rescuer so we shouldn't depend on any other WQ activity to make a
forward progress so calling drain_all_pages from a worker context is
safe as long as this doesn't happen from mm_percpu_wq itself which is
not the case because all workers are required to _not_ depend on any MM
locks.
Why is this a problem in the first place? ACPI driven memory hot-remove
(acpi_device_hotplug) is executed from the worker context. We end up
calling __offline_pages to free all the pages and that requires both
lru_add_drain_all_cpuslocked and drain_all_pages to do their job
otherwise we can have dangling pages on pcp lists and fail the offline
operation (__test_page_isolated_in_pageblock would see a page with 0 ref
count but without PageBuddy set).
Fix the issue by removing the worker check in drain_all_pages.
lru_add_drain_all_cpuslocked doesn't have this restriction so it works
as expected.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170828093341.26341-1-mhocko@kernel.org
Fixes: 0ccce3b924212 ("mm, page_alloc: drain per-cpu pages from workqueue context")
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> [4.11+]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>