linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 0/5] SLUB debugfs improvements based on stackdepot

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Date:   Wed, 2 Mar 2022 18:27:30 +0100
From:   Marco Elver <elver@...gle.com>
To:     Hyeonggon Yoo <42.hyeyoo@...il.com>
Cc:     Mike Rapoport <rppt@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
        Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux.com>,
        Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@....com>,
        Pekka Enberg <penberg@...nel.org>,
        Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@...ux.dev>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        patches@...ts.linux.dev, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Oliver Glitta <glittao@...il.com>,
        Faiyaz Mohammed <faiyazm@...eaurora.org>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@...radead.org>,
        Karolina Drobnik <karolinadrobnik@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/5] SLUB debugfs improvements based on stackdepot

On Wed, 2 Mar 2022 at 18:02, Hyeonggon Yoo <42.hyeyoo@...il.com> wrote:
[...]
> So IMO we have two solutions.
>
> First solution is only allowing early init and avoiding late init.
> (setting a global variable that is visible to stack depot would do this)
>
> And second solution is to make caller allocate and manage its own hash
> table. All of this complexity is because we're trying to make stack_table
> global.

I think this would be a mistake, because then we have to continuously
audit all users of stackdepot and make sure that allocation stack
traces don't end up in duplicate hash tables. It's global for a
reason.

> First solution looks ok if we have few users of stack depot.
> But I think we should use second approach if stack depot is growing
> more and more callers?

The problem here really is just that initialization of stackdepot and
slabs can have a cyclic dependency with the changes you're making. I
very much doubt there'll be other cases (beyond the allocator itself
used by stackdepot) which can introduce such a cyclic dependency.

The easiest way to break the cyclic dependency is to initialize
stackdepot earlier, assuming it can be determined it is required (in
this case it can because the command line is parsed before slab
creation). The suggestion with the stack_depot_needed_early variable
(like Mike's suggested code) would solve all that.

I don't understand the concern about multiple contexts. The problem is
just about a cyclic dependency during early init, and I doubt we'll
have more of that.

Thanks,
-- Marco