These days, hugepages are demand-allocated at first fault time. There's a
somewhat dubious (and racy) heuristic when making a new mmap() to check if
there are enough available hugepages to fully satisfy that mapping.
A particularly obvious case where the heuristic breaks down is where a
process maps its hugepages not as a single chunk, but as a bunch of
individually mmap()ed (or shmat()ed) blocks without touching and
instantiating the pages in between allocations. In this case the size of
each block is compared against the total number of available hugepages.
It's thus easy for the process to become overcommitted, because each block
mapping will succeed, although the total number of hugepages required by
all blocks exceeds the number available. In particular, this defeats such
a program which will detect a mapping failure and adjust its hugepage usage
downward accordingly.
The patch below addresses this problem, by strictly reserving a number of
physical hugepages for hugepage inodes which have been mapped, but not
instatiated. MAP_SHARED mappings are thus "safe" - they will fail on
mmap(), not later with an OOM SIGKILL. MAP_PRIVATE mappings can still
trigger an OOM. (Actually SHARED mappings can technically still OOM, but
only if the sysadmin explicitly reduces the hugepage pool between mapping
and instantiation)
This patch appears to address the problem at hand - it allows DB2 to start
correctly, for instance, which previously suffered the failure described
above.
This patch causes no regressions on the libhugetblfs testsuite, and makes a
test (designed to catch this problem) pass which previously failed (ppc64,
POWER5).
Signed-off-by: David Gibson <dwg@au1.ibm.com>
Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
b45b5bd65f