In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm: vmscan: remove deadlock due to throttling failing to make progress A soft lockup bug in kcompactd was reported in a private bugzilla with the following visible in dmesg; watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#33 stuck for 26s! [kcompactd0:479] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#33 stuck for 52s! [kcompactd0:479] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#33 stuck for 78s! [kcompactd0:479] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#33 stuck for 104s! [kcompactd0:479] The machine had 256G of RAM with no swap and an earlier failed allocation indicated that node 0 where kcompactd was run was potentially unreclaimable; Node 0 active_anon:29355112kB inactive_anon:2913528kB active_file:0kB inactive_file:0kB unevictable:64kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):0kB mapped:8kB dirty:0kB writeback:0kB shmem:26780kB shmem_thp: 0kB shmem_pmdmapped: 0kB anon_thp: 23480320kB writeback_tmp:0kB kernel_stack:2272kB pagetables:24500kB all_unreclaimable? yes Vlastimil Babka investigated a crash dump and found that a task migrating pages was trying to drain PCP lists; PID: 52922 TASK: ffff969f820e5000 CPU: 19 COMMAND: "kworker/u128:3" Call Trace: __schedule schedule schedule_timeout wait_for_completion __flush_work __drain_all_pages __alloc_pages_slowpath.constprop.114 __alloc_pages alloc_migration_target migrate_pages migrate_to_node do_migrate_pages cpuset_migrate_mm_workfn process_one_work worker_thread kthread ret_from_fork This failure is specific to CONFIG_PREEMPT=n builds. The root of the problem is that kcompact0 is not rescheduling on a CPU while a task that has isolated a large number of the pages from the LRU is waiting on kcompact0 to reschedule so the pages can be released. While shrink_inactive_list() only loops once around too_many_isolated, reclaim can continue without rescheduling if sc->skipped_deactivate == 1 which could happen if there was no file LRU and the inactive anon list was not low.