Tetsuo Handa has reported that the system might basically livelock in
OOM condition without triggering the OOM killer.

The issue is caused by internal dependency of the direct reclaim on
vmstat counter updates (via zone_reclaimable) which are performed from
the workqueue context.  If all the current workers get assigned to an
allocation request, though, they will be looping inside the allocator
trying to reclaim memory but zone_reclaimable can see stalled numbers so
it will consider a zone reclaimable even though it has been scanned way
too much.  WQ concurrency logic will not consider this situation as a
congested workqueue because it relies that worker would have to sleep in
such a situation.  This also means that it doesn't try to spawn new
workers or invoke the rescuer thread if the one is assigned to the
queue.

In order to fix this issue we need to do two things.  First we have to
let wq concurrency code know that we are in trouble so we have to do a
short sleep.  In order to prevent from issues handled by 0e093d99
("writeback: do not sleep on the congestion queue if there are no
congested BDIs or if significant congestion is not being encountered in
the current zone") we limit the sleep only to worker threads which are
the ones of the interest anyway.

The second thing to do is to create a dedicated workqueue for vmstat and
mark it WQ_MEM_RECLAIM to note it participates in the reclaim and to
have a spare worker thread for it.
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Reported-by: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Cristopher Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <js1304@gmail.com>
Cc: Arkadiusz Miskiewicz <arekm@maven.pl>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>