From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Alexander Graf Date: Tue, 06 May 2014 07:05:42 +0000 Subject: Re: [PATCH] KVM: PPC: BOOK3S: HV: Don't try to allocate from kernel page allocator for hash page tab Message-Id: <536889C6.1050603@suse.de> List-Id: References: <1399224322-22028-1-git-send-email-aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <53677558.50900@suse.de> <87r4489ttk.fsf@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <20FFDF8F-1A3D-4719-B492-1E4B70F9D1B4@suse.de> <1399334797.20388.71.camel@pasglop> In-Reply-To: <1399334797.20388.71.camel@pasglop> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: "Aneesh Kumar K.V" , "paulus@samba.org" , "linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org" , "kvm-ppc@vger.kernel.org" , "kvm@vger.kernel.org" On 06.05.14 02:06, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > On Mon, 2014-05-05 at 17:16 +0200, Alexander Graf wrote: >> Isn't this a greater problem? We should start swapping before we hit >> the point where non movable kernel allocation fails, no? > Possibly but the fact remains, this can be avoided by making sure that > if we create a CMA reserve for KVM, then it uses it rather than using > the rest of main memory for hash tables. So why were we preferring non-CMA memory before? Considering that Aneesh introduced that logic in fa61a4e3 I suppose this was just a mistake? >> The fact that KVM uses a good number of normal kernel pages is maybe >> suboptimal, but shouldn't be a critical problem. > The point is that we explicitly reserve those pages in CMA for use > by KVM for that specific purpose, but the current code tries first > to get them out of the normal pool. > > This is not an optimal behaviour and is what Aneesh patches are > trying to fix. I agree, and I agree that it's worth it to make better use of our resources. But we still shouldn't crash. However, reading through this thread I think I've slowly grasped what the problem is. The hugetlbfs size calculation. I guess something in your stack overreserves huge pages because it doesn't account for the fact that some part of system memory is already reserved for CMA. So the underlying problem is something completely orthogonal. The patch body as is is fine, but the patch description should simply say that we should prefer the CMA region because it's already reserved for us for this purpose and we make better use of our available resources that way. All the bits about pinning, numa, libvirt and whatnot don't really matter and are just details that led Aneesh to find this non-optimal allocation. Alex