netdev - Re: [PATCH] net/skbuff: silence warnings under memory pressure

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Date:   Fri, 30 Aug 2019 14:06:55 -0400
From:   Qian Cai <cai@....pw>
To:     Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com>, davem@...emloft.net
Cc:     netdev@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] net/skbuff: silence warnings under memory pressure

On Fri, 2019-08-30 at 18:15 +0200, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> 
> On 8/30/19 5:25 PM, Qian Cai wrote:
> > On Fri, 2019-08-30 at 17:11 +0200, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> > > 
> > > On 8/30/19 4:57 PM, Qian Cai wrote:
> > > > When running heavy memory pressure workloads, the system is throwing
> > > > endless warnings below due to the allocation could fail from
> > > > __build_skb(), and the volume of this call could be huge which may
> > > > generate a lot of serial console output and cosumes all CPUs as
> > > > warn_alloc() could be expensive by calling dump_stack() and then
> > > > show_mem().
> > > > 
> > > > Fix it by silencing the warning in this call site. Also, it seems
> > > > unnecessary to even print a warning at all if the allocation failed in
> > > > __build_skb(), as it may just retransmit the packet and retry.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Same patches are showing up there and there from time to time.
> > > 
> > > Why is this particular spot interesting, against all others not adding
> > > __GFP_NOWARN ?
> > > 
> > > Are we going to have hundred of patches adding __GFP_NOWARN at various
> > > points,
> > > or should we get something generic to not flood the syslog in case of
> > > memory
> > > pressure ?
> > > 
> > 
> > From my testing which uses LTP oom* tests. There are only 3 places need to
> > be
> > patched. The other two are in IOMMU code for both Intel and AMD. The place
> > is
> > particular interesting because it could cause the system with floating
> > serial
> > console output for days without making progress in OOM. I suppose it ends up
> > in
> > a looping condition that warn_alloc() would end up generating more calls
> > into
> > __build_skb() via ksoftirqd.
> > 
> 
> Yes, but what about other tests done by other people ?

Sigh, I don't know what tests do you have in mind. I tried many memory pressure
tests including LTP, stress-ng, and mmtests etc running for years. I don't
recall see other places that could loop like this for days.

> 
> You do not really answer my last question, which was really the point I tried
> to make.
> 
> If there is a risk of flooding the syslog, we should fix this generically
> in mm layer, not adding hundred of __GFP_NOWARN all over the places.
> 
> Maybe just make __GFP_NOWARN the default, I dunno.

I don't really see how it could end up with adding hundred of _GFP_NOWARN in the
kernel code. If there is really a hundred places could loop like this, it may
make more sense looking into a general solution.