Re: [PATCH v3 5/5] alloc_tag: config to store page allocation tag refs in page flags

Michal Hocko
2024-10-18T13:03:46Z

On Tue 15-10-24 08:58:59, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 15, 2024 at 8:42 AM David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> wrote:
[...]
> > Right, I think what John is concerned about (and me as well) is that
> > once a new feature really needs a page flag, there will be objection
> > like "no you can't, we need them for allocation tags otherwise that
> > feature will be degraded".
>
> I do understand your concern but IMHO the possibility of degrading a
> feature should not be a reason to always operate at degraded capacity
> (which is what we have today). If one is really concerned about
> possible future regression they can set
> CONFIG_PGALLOC_TAG_USE_PAGEFLAGS=n and keep what we have today. That's
> why I'm strongly advocating that we do need
> CONFIG_PGALLOC_TAG_USE_PAGEFLAGS so that the user has control over how
> this scarce resource is used.

I really do not think users will know how/why to setup this and I wouldn't
even bother them thinking about that at all TBH.

This is an implementation detail. It is fine to reuse unused flags space
as a storage as a performance optimization but why do you want users to
bother with that? Why would they ever want to say N here?
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs