Re: [RFC-PATCH 1/2] mm: Add __GFP_NO_LOCKS flag

Michal Hocko
2020-08-17T08:28:57Z

On Mon 17-08-20 00:56:55, Uladzislau Rezki wrote:
[...]
> Michal asked to provide some data regarding how many pages we need and how
> "lockless allocation" behaves when it comes to success vs failed scenarios.
>
> Please see below some results. The test case is a tight loop of 1 000 000 allocations
> doing kmalloc() and kfree_rcu():

It would be nice to cover some more realistic workloads as well.

> sudo ./test_vmalloc.sh run_test_mask=2048 single_cpu_test=1
>
> <snip>
> for (i = 0; i < 1 000 000; i++) {
> p = kmalloc(sizeof(*p), GFP_KERNEL);
> if (!p)
> return -1;
>
> p->array[0] = 'a';
> kvfree_rcu(p, rcu);
> }
> <snip>
>
> wget ftp://vps418301.ovh.net/incoming/1000000_kmalloc_kfree_rcu_proc_percpu_pagelist_fractio_is_0.png

If I understand this correctly then this means that failures happen very
often because pcp pages are not recycled quicklly enough.

> wget ftp://vps418301.ovh.net/incoming/1000000_kmalloc_kfree_rcu_proc_percpu_pagelist_fractio_is_8.png

1/8 of the memory in pcp lists is quite large and likely not something
used very often.

Both these numbers just make me think that a dedicated pool of page
pre-allocated for RCU specifically might be a better solution. I still
haven't read through that branch of the email thread though so there
might be some pretty convincing argments to not do that.

> Also i would like to underline, that kfree_rcu() reclaim logic can be improved further,
> making the drain logic more efficient when it comes to time, thus to reduce a footprint
> as a result number of required pages.
>
> --
> Vlad Rezki

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs