Re: suppress page allocation failure warnings from sys_listxattr

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:50:59 -0400 Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 06:46:02PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
>  > Could.  There was some discussion last year and implementations were
>  > tossed around.
>  > 
>  > I'm a bit apprehensive - kernel code is supposed to be robust, and
>  > large allocations are not robust and vmalloc() is crappy.
> 
> Can you expand on crappy ?

It's expensive on a per-call basis and can end up failing due to
internal fragmentation of vmalloc()'s virtually-addressed arena.  I
don't think I've ever seen a report of anyone getting a vmalloc()
failure due to the fragmentation issue, so it's largely theoretical. 
But of course, the more we use it (especially for long-lived
allocations), the greater the risk becomes.  Mainly to 32-bit machines,
I assume.

> Also, what happens if something allocates
> and sits on a bunch of vmalloc'd memory ? would we start seeing oom kills ?

vmalloc() would fail.

> (thinking of the context of my fuzzing tool where a bunch of instances could
>  feasibly call these syscalls and not sit on huge amounts per thread, but
>  collectively...  I'm wondering if it could be provoked into killing
>  processes I don't own)

umm, if you wanted to deliberately trigger a vmalloc() failure then I
guess a good approach would be to locate a vmalloc() site which can
persist beyond the syscall (modprobe is a good one!) then exercise it
in a way so that there are no N-byte holes left in the arena, then
trigger an N-byte vmalloc().