Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/6] Critical Page Pool

Matthew Dobson
2005-12-14T15:55:33Z

Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
>
>
>>The overall purpose of this patch series is to all a system administrator
>>to reserve a number of pages in a 'critical pool' that is set aside for
>>situations when the system is 'in emergency'. It is up to the individual
>>administrator to determine when his/her system is 'in emergency'. This is
>>not meant to (necessarily) anticipate OOM situations, though that is
>>certainly one possible use. The purpose this was originally designed for
>>is to allow the networking code to keep functioning despite the sytem
>>losing its (potentially networked) swap device, and thus temporarily
>>putting the system under exreme memory pressure.
>
>
> I don't see how this can ever work.
>
> How can _userspace_ know about what allocations are critical to the
> kernel?!

Well, it isn't userspace that is determining *which* allocations are
critical to the kernel. That is statically determined at compile time by
using the flag __GFP_CRITICAL on specific *kernel* allocations. Sridhar,
cc'd on this mail, has a set of patches that sprinkle the __GFP_CRITICAL
flag throughout the networking code to take advantage of this pool.
Userspace is in charge of determining *when* we're in an emergency
situation, and should thus use the critical pool, but not *which*
allocations are critical to surviving this emergency situation.

> And as you noticed, it does not work for your original usage case,
> because reserved memory pool would have to be "sum of all network
> interface bandwidths * ammount of time expected to survive without
> network" which is way too much.

Well, I never suggested it didn't work for my original usage case. The
discussion we had is that it would be incredibly difficult to 100%
iron-clad guarantee that the pool would NEVER run out of pages. But we can
size the pool, especially given a decent workload approximation, so as to
make failure far less likely.

> If you want few emergency pages for some strange hack you are doing
> (swapping over network?), just put swap into ramdisk and swapon() it
> when you are in emergency, or use memory hotplug and plug few more
> gigabytes into your machine. But don't go introducing infrastructure
> that _can't_ be used right.

Well, that's basically the point of posting these patches as an RFC. I'm
not quite so delusional as to think they're going to get picked up right
now. I was, however, hoping for feedback to figure out how to design
infrastructure that *can* be used right, as well as trying to find other
potential users of such a feature.

Thanks!

-Matt