Re: USB: hub: Delete an error message for a failed memory allocation in usb_hub_clear_tt_buffer()

Alan Stern
2017-12-08T17:42:08Z

On Fri, 8 Dec 2017, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

> Hi Alan,
>
> On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 10:26 PM, Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > On Thu, 7 Dec 2017, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> >> The standard is to treat them like errors and try press forward in a
> >> degraded mode but don't print a message. Checkpatch.pl complains if you
> >> print a warning for allocation failures. A lot of low level functions
> >> handle their own messages pretty well but especially kmalloc() does.
> >
> > Which brings us back to my original objection. If an allocation
> > failure has localized effects, but the low-level warning is unable to
> > specify what will be affected, how is the user supposed to connect the
> > effect to the cause?
>
> The backtrace would include usb_hub_clear_tt_buffer, so the user will
> know USB is affected.
> Note that the cause of the memory exhaustion is usually not the caller.
> Unless it requests a real big block of memory, in which case that will be
> mentioned in the backtrace, too.
>
> In this particular case, the driver uses GFP_ATOMIC, so allocation failures
> aren't that rare, and I think the driver should be prepared for that, and try
> to recover gracefully.
>
> The comment
>
> /* FIXME recover somehow ... RESET_TT? */
>
> makes me think it isn't.
>
> As this is a pretty small allocation, perhaps it can be done beforehand, without
> GFP_ATOMIC?

I can't see how to make that work. We don't know beforehand how many
structures will be needed at any time.

Alan Stern