Re: Do we still need SLAB_MEM_SPREAD (and possibly others)?

Vlastimil Babka
2024-01-31T22:40:26Z

On 1/31/24 23:25, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 2:20 PM Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
>>
>> I was looking into moving eventfs_inode into a slab, and after cutting and
>> pasting the tracefs allocator:
>>
>> tracefs_inode_cachep = kmem_cache_create("tracefs_inode_cache",
>> sizeof(struct tracefs_inode),
>> 0, (SLAB_RECLAIM_ACCOUNT|
>> SLAB_MEM_SPREAD|
>> SLAB_ACCOUNT),
>> init_once);
>>
>> I figured I should know what those slab flags mean. I also looked at what
>> others in fs use for their slabs. The above is rather common (which I
>> probably just copied from another file system), but I wanted to know what
>> they are for.
>>
>> When I got to SLAB_MEM_SPREAD, I found that it's a common flag and there's
>> a lot of caches that just set that and nothing else.
>>
>> But I couldn't find how it was used.
>>
>> Then I found this commit:
>>
>> 16a1d968358a ("mm/slab: remove mm/slab.c and slab_def.h")
>>
>> Which I think removed the only use case of SLAB_MEM_SPREAD.
>>
>> $ git grep SLAB_MEM_SPREAD mm
>> mm/slab.h: SLAB_MEM_SPREAD | \
>>
>> That's all I find in the mm directory.
>>
>> Is it obsolete now? Can we delete it? Maybe there's other SLAB_* flags that
>> are no longer used. I don't know, I haven't audited them.
>
> Perhaps cpuset_do_slab_mem_spread() as well.

Yep, good find. Show how obscure mm/slab.c was in the end :)

CCing a few more new people who did slab changes recently, who'd like some
low hanging fruit of negative diffcount? :)

Thanks,
Vlastimil