linux-kernel - Re: Memory allocation on speculative fastpaths

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Message-ID: <YnFSfc8BR8CadOtw@dhcp22.suse.cz>
Date:   Tue, 3 May 2022 18:04:13 +0200
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
To:     "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...nel.org>
Cc:     liam.howlett@...cle.com, willy@...radead.org, walken.cr@...il.com,
        hannes@...xchg.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Memory allocation on speculative fastpaths

On Tue 03-05-22 08:59:13, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Just following up from off-list discussions yesterday.
> 
> The requirements to allocate on an RCU-protected speculative fastpath
> seem to be as follows:
> 
> 1.	Never sleep.
> 2.	Never reclaim.
> 3.	Leave emergency pools alone.
> 
> Any others?
> 
> If those rules suffice, and if my understanding of the GFP flags is
> correct (ha!!!), then the following GFP flags should cover this:
> 
> 	__GFP_NOMEMALLOC | __GFP_NOWARN

GFP_NOWAIT | __GFP_NOMEMALLOC | __GFP_NOWARN
 
> Or is this just a fancy way of always returning NULL or some such?  ;-)

It could fail quite easily. We would also want to guarantee (by
documenting I guess) that the page allocator never does anything that
would depend or invoke rcu_synchronize or something like that.

I believe this is the case currently.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs