[PATCH v2] mm, compaction: properly signal and act upon lock and need_sched() contention

[Shawn Guo]

On 23 May 2014 07:49, Kevin Hilman <khilman at linaro.org> wrote:
> On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 2:47 AM, Vlastimil Babka <vbabka at suse.cz> wrote:
>> Compaction uses compact_checklock_irqsave() function to periodically check for
>> lock contention and need_resched() to either abort async compaction, or to
>> free the lock, schedule and retake the lock. When aborting, cc->contended is
>> set to signal the contended state to the caller. Two problems have been
>> identified in this mechanism.
>
> This patch (or later version) has hit next-20140522 (in the form
> commit 645ceea9331bfd851bc21eea456dda27862a10f4) and according to my
> bisect, appears to be the culprit of several boot failures on ARM
> platforms.

On i.MX6 where CMA is enabled, the commit causes the drivers calling
dma_alloc_coherent() fail to probe.  Tracing it a little bit, it seems
dma_alloc_from_contiguous() always return page as NULL after this
commit.

Shawn