Re: [PATCH 0/5] make slab gfp fair

Matt Mackall
2007-05-14T16:13:54Z

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 08:53:21AM -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Mon, 14 May 2007, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
> > In the interest of creating a reserve based allocator; we need to make the slab
> > allocator (*sigh*, all three) fair with respect to GFP flags.
>
> I am not sure what the point of all of this is.
>
> > That is, we need to protect memory from being used by easier gfp flags than it
> > was allocated with. If our reserve is placed below GFP_ATOMIC, we do not want a
> > GFP_KERNEL allocation to walk away with it - a scenario that is perfectly
> > possible with the current allocators.
>
> Why does this have to handled by the slab allocators at all? If you have
> free pages in the page allocator then the slab allocators will be able to
> use that reserve.

If I understand this correctly:

privileged thread unprivileged greedy process
kmem_cache_alloc(...)
adds new slab page from lowmem pool
do_io()
kmem_cache_alloc(...)
kmem_cache_alloc(...)
kmem_cache_alloc(...)
kmem_cache_alloc(...)
kmem_cache_alloc(...)
...
eats it all
kmem_cache_alloc(...) -> ENOMEM
who ate my donuts?!

But I think this solution is somehow overkill. If we only care about
this issue in the OOM avoidance case, then our rank reduces to a
boolean.

--
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.