RE: [HPDD-discuss] [PATCH 2/11] Staging: lustre: fld: Use kzalloc and kfree

Julia Lawall
2015-05-01T17:48:20Z

On Fri, 1 May 2015, Simmons, James A. wrote:

> >From: Julia Lawall <Julia.Lawall@lip6.fr>
> >
> >Replace OBD_ALLOC, OBD_ALLOC_WAIT, OBD_ALLOC_PTR, and OBD_ALLOC_PTR_WAIT by
> >kalloc/kcalloc, and OBD_FREE and OBD_FREE_PTR by kfree.
>
> Nak: James Simmons <jsimmons@infradead.org>
>
> A simple replace will not work. The OBD_ALLOC and OBD_FREE functions allocate memory
> anywhere from one page to 4MB in size. You can't use kmalloc for the 4MB allocations.
> Currently lustre uses a 4 page water mark to determine if we allocate using vmalloc. Even
> using kmalloc for 4 pages has shown high failure rates on some systems. It gets even more
> messy with 64K page systems like ppc64 boxes. Now I'm not suggesting to port the larger
> allocations to vmalloc either since issues have been founded with using vmalloc. For example
> when using large stripe count files the MDS rpc generated crosses the 4 page line and vmalloc
> is used. Using vmalloc caused a global spinlock to be taken which causes meta data operations
> to serialized on the MDS servers.

It's not the LARGE functions that do the switching? For example OBD_ALLOC
ends up at __OBD_MALLOC_VERBOSE, which as far as I can see calls kmalloc
(with __GFP_ZERO, and hance the use of kzalloc).

julia