Re: [PATCH v2 2/3] mm, page_owner: decouple freeing stack trace from debug_pagealloc

Kirill A. Shutemov
2019-10-01T11:51:18Z

On Tue, Oct 01, 2019 at 10:07:44AM +0200, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> On 10/1/19 1:49 AM, Qian Cai wrote:
> >
> >
> >> On Sep 30, 2019, at 5:43 PM, Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> wrote:
> >>
> >> Well, my use case is shipping production kernels with CONFIG_PAGE_OWNER
> >> and CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC enabled, and instructing users to boot-time
> >> enable only for troubleshooting a crash or memory leak, without a need
> >> to install a debug kernel. Things like static keys and page_ext
> >> allocations makes this possible without CPU and memory overhead when not
> >> boot-time enabled. I don't know too much about KASAN internals, but I
> >> assume it's not possible to use it that way on production kernels yet?
> >
> > In that case, why can’t users just simply enable page_owner=on and
> > debug_pagealloc=on for troubleshooting? The later makes the kernel
> > slower, but I am not sure if it is worth optimization by adding a new
> > parameter. There have already been quite a few MM-related kernel
> > parameters that could tidy up a bit in the future.
>
> They can do that and it was intention, yes. The extra parameter was
> requested by Kirill, so I'll defer the answer to him :)

DEBUG_PAGEALLOC is much more intrusive debug option. Not all architectures
support it in an efficient way. Some require hibernation.

I don't see a reason to tie these two option together.

--
Kirill A. Shutemov