mm, page_alloc: always use a captured page regardless of compaction result

During the development of commit 5e1f0f098b46 ("mm, compaction: capture a page under direct compaction"), a paranoid check was added to ensure that if a captured page was available after compaction that it was consistent with the final state of compaction. The intent was to catch serious programming bugs such as using a stale page pointer and causing corruption problems. However, it is possible to get a captured page even if compaction was unsuccessful if an interrupt triggered and happened to free pages in interrupt context that got merged into a suitable high-order page. It's highly unlikely but Li Wang did report the following warning on s390 occuring when testing OOM handling. Note that the warning is slightly edited for clarity. WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 9783 at mm/page_alloc.c:3777 __alloc_pages_direct_compact+0x182/0x190 Modules linked in: rpcsec_gss_krb5 auth_rpcgss nfsv4 dns_resolver nfs lockd grace fscache sunrpc pkey ghash_s390 prng xts aes_s390 des_s390 des_generic sha512_s390 zcrypt_cex4 zcrypt vmur binfmt_misc ip_tables xfs libcrc32c dasd_fba_mod qeth_l2 dasd_eckd_mod dasd_mod qeth qdio lcs ctcm ccwgroup fsm dm_mirror dm_region_hash dm_log dm_mod CPU: 0 PID: 9783 Comm: copy.sh Kdump: loaded Not tainted 5.1.0-rc 5 #1 This patch simply removes the check entirely instead of trying to be clever about pages freed from interrupt context. If a serious programming error was introduced, it is highly likely to be caught by prep_new_page() instead.

MGMel Gorman committed 7 years ago