Re: [patch v2 for-4.0] mm, thp: really limit transparent hugepage allocation to local node

[Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>]

On 25.2.2015 22:24, David Rientjes wrote:
>
>> alloc_pages_preferred_node() variant, change the exact_node() variant to pass
>> __GFP_THISNODE, and audit and adjust all callers accordingly.
>>
> Sounds like that should be done as part of a cleanup after the 4.0 issues
> are addressed.  alloc_pages_exact_node() does seem to suggest that we want
> exactly that node, implying __GFP_THISNODE behavior already, so it would
> be good to avoid having this come up again in the future.

Oh lovely, just found out that there's alloc_pages_node which should be the
preferred-only version, but in fact does not differ from 
alloc_pages_exact_node
in any relevant way. I agree we should do some larger cleanup for next 
version.

>> Also, you pass __GFP_NOWARN but that should be covered by GFP_TRANSHUGE
>> already. Of course, nothing guarantees that hugepage == true implies that gfp
>> == GFP_TRANSHUGE... but current in-tree callers conform to that.
>>
> Ah, good point, and it includes __GFP_NORETRY as well which means that
> this patch is busted.  It won't try compaction or direct reclaim in the
> page allocator slowpath because of this:
>
> 	/*
> 	 * GFP_THISNODE (meaning __GFP_THISNODE, __GFP_NORETRY and
> 	 * __GFP_NOWARN set) should not cause reclaim since the subsystem
> 	 * (f.e. slab) using GFP_THISNODE may choose to trigger reclaim
> 	 * using a larger set of nodes after it has established that the
> 	 * allowed per node queues are empty and that nodes are
> 	 * over allocated.
> 	 */
> 	if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_NUMA) &&
> 	    (gfp_mask & GFP_THISNODE) == GFP_THISNODE)
> 		goto nopage;
>
> Hmm.  It would be disappointing to have to pass the nodemask of the exact
> node that we want to allocate from into the page allocator to avoid using
> __GFP_THISNODE.

Yeah.

>
> There's a sneaky way around it by just removing __GFP_NORETRY from
> GFP_TRANSHUGE so the condition above fails and since the page allocator
> won't retry for such a high-order allocation, but that probably just
> papers over this stuff too much already.  I think what we want to do is

Alternatively alloc_pages_exact_node() adds __GFP_THISNODE just to
node_zonelist() call and not to __alloc_pages() gfp_mask proper? Unless 
__GFP_THISNODE
was given *also* in the incoming gfp_mask, this should give us the right 
combination?
But it's also subtle....

> cause the slab allocators to not use __GFP_WAIT if they want to avoid
> reclaim.

Yes, the fewer subtle heuristics we have that include combinations of 
flags (*cough*
GFP_TRANSHUGE *cough*), the better.

> This is probably going to be a much more invasive patch than originally
> thought.

Right, we might be changing behavior not just for slab allocators, but 
also others using such
combination of flags.

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