Re: [PATCH 0/2 v2] remove PF_MEMALLOC_NORECLAIM

Michal Hocko
2024-09-05T14:12:56Z

On Thu 05-09-24 09:53:26, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 05, 2024 at 01:26:50PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > > > > This is exactly GFP_KERNEL semantic for low order allocations or
> > > > > > kvmalloc for that matter. They simply never fail unless couple of corner
> > > > > > cases - e.g. the allocating task is an oom victim and all of the oom
> > > > > > memory reserves have been consumed. This is where we call "not possible
> > > > > > to allocate".
> > > > >
> > > > > Which does beg the question of why GFP_NOFAIL exists.
> > > >
> > > > Exactly for the reason that even rare failure is not acceptable and
> > > > there is no way to handle it other than keep retrying. Typical code was
> > > > while (!(ptr = kmalloc()))
> > > > ;
> > >
> > > But is it _rare_ failure, or _no_ failure?
> > >
> > > You seem to be saying (and I just reviewed the code, it looks like
> > > you're right) that there is essentially no difference in behaviour
> > > between GFP_KERNEL and GFP_NOFAIL.
>
> That may be the currrent state of affiars; but is it
> ****guaranteed**** forever and ever, amen, that GFP_KERNEL will never
> fail if the amount of memory allocated was lower than a particular
> multiple of the page size?

No, GFP_KERNEL is not guaranteed. Allocator tries as hard as it can to
satisfy those allocations for order <= PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER.

GFP_NOFAIL is guaranteed for order <= 1 for page allocator and there is
no practical limit for vmalloc currently. This is what our documentation
says
* The default allocator behavior depends on the request size. We have a concept
* of so-called costly allocations (with order > %PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER).
* !costly allocations are too essential to fail so they are implicitly
* non-failing by default (with some exceptions like OOM victims might fail so
* the caller still has to check for failures) while costly requests try to be
* not disruptive and back off even without invoking the OOM killer.
* The following three modifiers might be used to override some of these
* implicit rules.

There is no guarantee this will be that way for ever. This is unlikely
to change though.
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs