linux-kernel - Re: [patch 1/5] mm: add nofail variants of kmalloc kcalloc and kzalloc

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Date:	Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:09:21 -0700 (PDT)
From:	David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>
To:	"Ted Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Jens Axboe <jaxboe@...ionio.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Neil Brown <neilb@...e.de>, Alasdair G Kergon <agk@...hat.com>,
	Chris Mason <chris.mason@...cle.com>,
	Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@...hat.com>,
	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
	Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@...il.com>,
	"linux-raid@...r.kernel.org" <linux-raid@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-btrfs@...r.kernel.org" <linux-btrfs@...r.kernel.org>,
	"cluster-devel@...hat.com" <cluster-devel@...hat.com>,
	"linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org" <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>,
	"reiserfs-devel@...r.kernel.org" <reiserfs-devel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [patch 1/5] mm: add nofail variants of kmalloc kcalloc and
 kzalloc

On Wed, 25 Aug 2010, Ted Ts'o wrote:

> > We certainly hope that nobody will reimplement the same function without 
> > the __deprecated warning, especially for order < PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER 
> > where there's no looping at a higher level.  So perhaps the best 
> > alternative is to implement the same _nofail() functions but do a 
> > WARN_ON(get_order(size) > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER) instead?
> 
> Yeah, that sounds better.
> 

Ok, and we'll make it a WARN_ON_ONCE() to be nice to the kernel log.  
Although the current patchset does this with WARN_ON_ONCE(1, ...) instead, 
this serves to ensure that we aren't dependent on the page allocator's 
implementation to always loop for order < PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER in which 
case the loop in the _nofail() functions would actually do something.

> > I think it's really sad that the caller can't know what the upper bounds 
> > of its memory requirement are ahead of time or at least be able to 
> > implement a memory freeing function when kmalloc() returns NULL.
> 
> Oh, we can determine an upper bound.  You might just not like it.
> Actually ext3/ext4 shouldn't be as bad as XFS, which Dave estimated to
> be around 400k for a transaction.  My guess is that the worst case for
> ext3/ext4 is probably around 256k or so; like XFS, most of the time,
> it would be a lot less.  (At least, if data != journalled; if we are
> doing data journalling and every single data block begins with
> 0xc03b3998U, we'll need to allocate a 4k page for every single data
> block written.)  We could dynamically calculate an upper bound if we
> had to.  Of course, if ext3/ext4 is attached to a network block
> device, then it could get a lot worse than 256k, of course.
> 

On my 8GB machine, /proc/zoneinfo says the min watermark for ZONE_NORMAL 
is 5086 pages, or ~20MB.  GFP_ATOMIC would allow access to ~12MB of that, 
so perhaps we should consider this is an acceptable abuse of GFP_ATOMIC as 
a fallback behavior when GFP_NOFS or GFP_NOIO fails?
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