Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] improve vmalloc allocation

Roman Gushchin
2018-10-19T22:54:08Z

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 07:35:36PM +0200, Uladzislau Rezki (Sony) wrote:
> Objective
> ---------
> Initiative of improving vmalloc allocator comes from getting many issues
> related to allocation time, i.e. sometimes it is terribly slow. As a result
> many workloads which are sensitive for long (more than 1 millisecond) preemption
> off scenario are affected by that slowness(test cases like UI or audio, etc.).
>
> The problem is that, currently an allocation of the new VA area is done over
> busy list iteration until a suitable hole is found between two busy areas.
> Therefore each new allocation causes the list being grown. Due to long list
> and different permissive parameters an allocation can take a long time on
> embedded devices(milliseconds).
...
> 3) This one is related to PCPU allocator(see pcpu_alloc_test()). In that
> stress test case i see that SUnreclaim(/proc/meminfo) parameter gets increased,
> i.e. there is a memory leek somewhere in percpu allocator. It sounds like
> a memory that is allocated by pcpu_get_vm_areas() sometimes is not freed.
> Resulting in memory leaking or "Kernel panic":
>

Can you, please, try the following patch:
6685b357363b ("percpu: stop leaking bitmap metadata blocks") ?

BTW, with growing number of vmalloc users (per-cpu allocator and bpf stuff are
big drivers), I find the patchset very interesting.

Thanks!