Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm, debug: report when GFP_NO{FS,IO} is used explicitly from memalloc_no{fs,io}_{save,restore} context

Michal Hocko
2016-04-27T08:03:11Z

On Wed 27-04-16 08:58:45, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 01:56:12PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
> >
> > THIS PATCH IS FOR TESTING ONLY AND NOT MEANT TO HIT LINUS TREE
> >
> > It is desirable to reduce the direct GFP_NO{FS,IO} usage at minimum and
> > prefer scope usage defined by memalloc_no{fs,io}_{save,restore} API.
> >
> > Let's help this process and add a debugging tool to catch when an
> > explicit allocation request for GFP_NO{FS,IO} is done from the scope
> > context. The printed stacktrace should help to identify the caller
> > and evaluate whether it can be changed to use a wider context or whether
> > it is called from another potentially dangerous context which needs
> > a scope protection as well.
>
> You're going to get a large number of these from XFS. There are call
> paths in XFs that get called both inside and outside transaction
> context, and many of them are marked with GFP_NOFS to prevent issues
> that have cropped up in the past.
>
> Often these are to silence lockdep warnings (e.g. commit b17cb36
> ("xfs: fix missing KM_NOFS tags to keep lockdep happy")) because
> lockdep gets very unhappy about the same functions being called with
> different reclaim contexts. e.g. directory block mapping might
> occur from readdir (no transaction context) or within transactions
> (create/unlink). hence paths like this are tagged with GFP_NOFS to
> stop lockdep emitting false positive warnings....

I would much rather see lockdep being fixed than abusing GFP_NOFS to
workaround its limitations. GFP_NOFS has a real consequences to the
memory reclaim. I will go and check the commit you mentioned and try
to understand why that is a problem. From what you described above
I would like to get rid of exactly this kind of usage which is not
really needed for the recursion protection.

Thanks!
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs