Re: [PATCH 1/1] rcu/tree: add emergency pool for headless case

Uladzislau Rezki
2020-04-06T16:32:27Z

> On Mon, Apr 06, 2020 at 02:56:40PM +0200, Uladzislau Rezki wrote:
> > Hello, Joel.
> >
> > > > >
> > > > > Hi Vlad,
> > > > >
> > > > > One concern I have is this moves the problem a bit further down. My belief is
> > > > > we should avoid the likelihood of even needing an rcu_head allocated for the
> > > > > headless case, to begin with - than trying to do damage-control when it does
> > > > > happen. The only way we would end up needing an rcu_head is if we could not
> > > > > allocate an array.
> > > > >
> > > > Let me share my view on all such caching. I think that now it becomes less as
> > > > the issue, because of we have now https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/4/2/383 patch.
> > > > I see that it does help a lot. I tried to simulate low memory condition and
> > > > apply high memory pressure with that. I did not manage to trigger the
> > > > "synchronize rcu" path at all. It is because of using much more permissive
> > > > parameters when we request a memory from the SLAB(direct reclaim, etc...).
> > >
> > > That's a good sign that we don't hit this path in your tests.
> > >
> > Just one request, of course if you have a time :) Could you please
> > double check on your test environment to stress the system to check
> > if you also can not hit it?
> >
> > How i test it. Please apply below patch:
>
> This is of course a double challenge.
>
> I can assure you that even if we cannot make it happen in the comfort and
> safety of our tests systems, someone somewhere will make it happen all
> the time. Because there is a very large number of Linux systems running
> out there.
>
> Which leads to the other challenge: How do we test this code path?
>
I have added extra tests to my "vmalloc tests" https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/4/2/384
for stressing head/headless variants. Also we have rcuperf module. Running them
together under KVM(selftests) would be good. Plus we can add a counter of the
path we think is bad, synchronize_rcu() and so on.

Thanks!

--
Vlad Rezki