linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/3] mm,thp,shm: limit gfp mask to no more than specified

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Date:   Fri, 27 Nov 2020 08:52:14 +0100
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
To:     Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>
Cc:     hughd@...gle.com, xuyu@...ux.alibaba.com,
        akpm@...ux-foundation.org, mgorman@...e.de, aarcange@...hat.com,
        willy@...radead.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        kernel-team@...com, linux-mm@...ck.org, vbabka@...e.cz
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/3] mm,thp,shm: limit gfp mask to no more than specified

On Thu 26-11-20 13:04:14, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Thu, 2020-11-26 at 14:40 +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Tue 24-11-20 14:49:24, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > > Matthew Wilcox pointed out that the i915 driver opportunistically
> > > allocates tmpfs memory, but will happily reclaim some of its
> > > pool if no memory is available.
> > > 
> > > Make sure the gfp mask used to opportunistically allocate a THP
> > > is always at least as restrictive as the original gfp mask.
> > 
> > I have brought this up in the previous version review and I feel my
> > feedback hasn't been addressed. Please describe the expected behavior
> > by
> > those shmem users including GFP_KERNEL restriction which would make
> > the
> > THP flags incompatible. Is this a problem? Is there any actual
> > problem
> > if the THP uses its own set of flags?
> 
> In the case of i915, the gfp flags passed in by the i915
> driver expect the VM to easily fail the allocation, in
> which case the i915 driver will reclaim some existing
> buffers and try again.

The existing code tries hard to prevent from the oom killer AFAIU.
At least that is what i915_gem_object_get_pages_gtt says. And that is
ok for order-0 (or low order) requests. But THPs are costly orders and
therefore __GFP_NORETRY has a different meaning. It still controls how
hard to try compact but this is not a OOM control. ttm_tt_swapout is
similar except it chosen to try harder for order-0 cases but still want
to prevent the oom killer. 

> Trying harder than the original gfp_mask would change the OOM behavior
> of systems using the i915 driver.
> 
> > I am also not happy how those two sets of flags are completely
> > detached
> > and we can only expect surprises there. 
> 
> I would be more than happy to implement things differently,
> but I am not sure what alternative you are suggesting.

Simply do not alter gfp flags? Or warn in some cases of a serious mismatch.
E.g. GFP_ZONEMASK mismatch because there are already GFP_KERNEL users of
shmem.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs