Subject: [linux-3.10.17] Could not allocate memory from free CMA areas

From: [email-masked] (Marek Szyprowski)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 14:49:20 +0200

Hello,

On 2014-07-09 01:41, PINTU KUMAR wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are facing one problem on linux 3.10 when we try to use CMA as large as 56MB for 256MB RAM device.
> We found that after certain point of time (during boot), min watermark check is failing when "free_pages" and "free_cma_pages" are almost equal and falls below the min level.
>
> system details:
> ARM embedded device: RAM: 256MB
> Kernel version: 3.10.17
> Fixed Reserved memory: ~40MB
> Available memory: 217MB
> CMA reserved 1 : 56MB
> ZRAM configured: 128MB or 64MB
> min_free_kbytes: 1625 (default)
> Memory controller group enabled (MEMCG)
>
>
> After boot-up the "free -tm" command shows free memory as: ~50MB
> CMA is used for all UI display purposes. CMA used during bootup is close to ~6MB.
> Thus most of the free memory is in the form of CMA free memory.
> ZRAM getting uses was around ~5MB.
>
>
> During boot-up itself we observe that the following conditions are met.
>
>
> if (free_pages - free_cma <= min + lowmem_reserve) {
>      printk"[PINTU]: __zone_watermark_ok: failed !\n");
>
>      return false;
> }
> Here: free_pages was: 12940, free_cma was: 12380, min: 566, lowmem: 0
>
>
> Thus is condition is met most of the time.
> And because of this watermark failure, Kswapd is waking up frequently.
> The /proc/pagetypeinfo reports that most of the higher order pages are from CMA regions.
>
>
> We also observed that ZRAM is trying to allocate memory from CMA region and failing.
>
> We also tried by decreasing the CMA region to 20MB. With this the watermark failure is not happening in boot time. But if we launch more than 3 apps {Browser, music-player etc}, again the watermark started failing.
>
> Also we tried decreasing the min_free_kbytes=256, and with this also watermark is passed.
>
> Our observation is that ZRAM/zsmalloc trying to allocate memory from CMA areas and failed.
>
>
> Please let us know if anybody have come across the same problem and how to resolve this issue.

Frankly I really have no idea what is going on. ZRAM/zsmalloc should not 
try to alloc memory from CMA. I don't have access you the mentioned 
source code. What flags are passed to alloc_pages() in zram/zsmalloc? It 
should get pages from non-movable pool.

Best regards
-- 
Marek Szyprowski, PhD
Samsung R&D Institute Poland