Re: [PATCH v2 2/4] mm/sparse: Optimize sparse_add_one_section()

Michal Hocko
2019-03-26T14:03:52Z

On Tue 26-03-19 21:45:22, Baoquan He wrote:
> On 03/26/19 at 11:17am, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Tue 26-03-19 18:08:17, Baoquan He wrote:
> > > On 03/26/19 at 10:29am, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > > On Tue 26-03-19 17:02:25, Baoquan He wrote:
> > > > > Reorder the allocation of usemap and memmap since usemap allocation
> > > > > is much simpler and easier. Otherwise hard work is done to make
> > > > > memmap ready, then have to rollback just because of usemap allocation
> > > > > failure.
> > > >
> > > > Is this really worth it? I can see that !VMEMMAP is doing memmap size
> > > > allocation which would be 2MB aka costly allocation but we do not do
> > > > __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL so the allocator backs off early.
> > >
> > > In !VMEMMAP case, it truly does simple allocation directly. surely
> > > usemap which size is 32 is smaller. So it doesn't matter that much who's
> > > ahead or who's behind. However, this benefit a little in VMEMMAP case.
> >
> > How does it help there? The failure should be even much less probable
> > there because we simply fall back to a small 4kB pages and those
> > essentially never fail.
>
> OK, I am fine to drop it. Or only put the section existence checking
> earlier to avoid unnecessary usemap/memmap allocation?

DO you have any data on how often that happens? Should basically never
happening, right?
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs