Re: [patch 00/12] mm: page_alloc: improve OOM mechanism and policy

Dave Chinner
2015-04-01T21:39:10Z

On Wed, Apr 01, 2015 at 05:19:20PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Mon 30-03-15 11:32:40, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 11:05:09AM -0400, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> [...]
> > > GFP_NOFS sites are currently one of the sites that can deadlock inside
> > > the allocator, even though many of them seem to have fallback code.
> > > My reasoning here is that if you *have* an exit strategy for failing
> > > allocations that is smarter than hanging, we should probably use that.
> >
> > We already do that for allocations where we can handle failure in
> > GFP_NOFS conditions. It is, however, somewhat useless if we can't
> > tell the allocator to try really hard if we've already had a failure
> > and we are already in memory reclaim conditions (e.g. a shrinker
> > trying to clean dirty objects so they can be reclaimed).
> >
> > From that perspective, I think that this patch set aims force us
> > away from handling fallbacks ourselves because a) it makes GFP_NOFS
> > more likely to fail, and b) provides no mechanism to "try harder"
> > when we really need the allocation to succeed.
>
> You can ask for this "try harder" by __GFP_HIGH flag. Would that help
> in your fallback case?

That dips into GFP_ATOMIC reserves, right? What is the impact on the
GFP_ATOMIC allocations that need it? We typically see network cards
fail GFP_ATOMIC allocations before XFS starts complaining about
allocation failures, so i suspect that this might just make things
worse rather than better...

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com