Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: add PF_MEMALLOC_NOFS

Michal Hocko
2016-04-27T07:51:07Z

On Wed 27-04-16 09:07:02, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 01:56:11PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
> >
> > GFP_NOFS context is used for the following 4 reasons currently
> > - to prevent from deadlocks when the lock held by the allocation
> > context would be needed during the memory reclaim
> > - to prevent from stack overflows during the reclaim because
> > the allocation is performed from a deep context already
> > - to prevent lockups when the allocation context depends on
> > other reclaimers to make a forward progress indirectly
> > - just in case because this would be safe from the fs POV
>
> - silencing lockdep false positives
>
> > Introduce PF_MEMALLOC_NOFS task specific flag and memalloc_nofs_{save,restore}
> > API to control the scope. This is basically copying
> > memalloc_noio_{save,restore} API we have for other restricted allocation
> > context GFP_NOIO.
> >
> > Xfs has already had a similar functionality as PF_FSTRANS so let's just
> > give it a more generic name and make it usable for others as well and
> > move the GFP_NOFS context tracking to the page allocator. Xfs has its
> > own accessor functions but let's keep them for now to reduce this patch
> > as minimum.
>
> Can you split this into two patches? The first simply does this:
>
> #define PF_MEMALLOC_NOFS PF_FSTRANS
>
> and changes only the XFS code to use PF_MEMALLOC_NOFS.
>
> The second patch can then do the rest of the mm API changes that we
> don't actually care about in XFS at all. That way I can carry all
> the XFS changes in the XFS tree and not have to worry about when
> this stuff gets merged or conflicts with the rest of the work that
> is being done to the mm/ code and whatever tree that eventually
> lands in...

Sure I will do that

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs