Re: [PATCH] slab: prevent warnings when allocating with __GFP_NOWARN

Sasha Levin
2013-06-11T00:55:04Z

On 06/10/2013 07:40 PM, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jun 2013, Sasha Levin wrote:
>
>> [ 1691.807621] Call Trace:
>> [ 1691.809473] [<ffffffff83ff4041>] dump_stack+0x4e/0x82
>> [ 1691.812783] [<ffffffff8111fe12>] warn_slowpath_common+0x82/0xb0
>> [ 1691.817011] [<ffffffff8111fe55>] warn_slowpath_null+0x15/0x20
>> [ 1691.819936] [<ffffffff81243dcf>] kmalloc_slab+0x2f/0xb0
>> [ 1691.824942] [<ffffffff81278d54>] __kmalloc+0x24/0x4b0
>> [ 1691.827285] [<ffffffff8196ffe3>] ? security_capable+0x13/0x20
>> [ 1691.829405] [<ffffffff812a26b7>] ? pipe_fcntl+0x107/0x210
>> [ 1691.831827] [<ffffffff812a26b7>] pipe_fcntl+0x107/0x210
>> [ 1691.833651] [<ffffffff812b7ea0>] ? fget_raw_light+0x130/0x3f0
>> [ 1691.835343] [<ffffffff812aa5fb>] SyS_fcntl+0x60b/0x6a0
>> [ 1691.837008] [<ffffffff8403ca98>] tracesys+0xe1/0xe6
>>
>> The caller specifically sets __GFP_NOWARN presumably to avoid this warning on
>> slub but I'm not sure if there's any other reason.
>
> There must be another reason. Lets fix this.

My, I feel silly now.

I was the one who added __GFP_NOFAIL in the first place in
2ccd4f4d ("pipe: fail cleanly when root tries F_SETPIPE_SZ
with big size").

What happens is that root can go ahead and specify any size
it wants to be used as buffer size - and the kernel will
attempt to comply by allocation that buffer. Which fails
if the size is too big.

Either way, even if we do end up doing something different,
shouldn't we prevent slab from spewing a warning if
__GFP_NOWARN is passed?

Thanks,
Sasha