On 26.01.21 16:34, Oscar Salvador wrote:
On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 04:10:53PM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
The real issue seems to be discarding the vmemmap on any memory that has
movability constraints - CMA and ZONE_MOVABLE; otherwise, as discussed, we
can reuse parts of the thingy we're freeing for the vmemmap. Not that it
would be ideal: that once-a-huge-page thing will never ever be a huge page
again - but if it helps with OOM in corner cases, sure.
Yes, that is one way, but I am not sure how hard would it be to implement.
Plus the fact that as you pointed out, once that memory is used for vmemmap
array, we cannot use it again.
Actually, we would fragment the memory eventually?
Possible simplification: don't perform the optimization for now with free
huge pages residing on ZONE_MOVABLE or CMA. Certainly not perfect: what
happens when migrating a huge page from ZONE_NORMAL to (ZONE_MOVABLE|CMA)?
But if we do not allow theose pages to be in ZONE_MOVABLE or CMA, there is no
point in migrate them, right?
Well, memory unplug "could" still work and migrate them and
alloc_contig_range() "could in the future" still want to migrate them
(virtio-mem, gigantic pages, powernv memtrace). Especially, the latter
two don't work with ZONE_MOVABLE/CMA. But, I mean, it would be fair
enough to say "there are no guarantees for
alloc_contig_range()/offline_pages() with ZONE_NORMAL, so we can break
these use cases when a magic switch is flipped and make these pages
non-migratable anymore".
I assume compaction doesn't care about huge pages either way, not sure
about numa balancing etc.
However, note that there is a fundamental issue with any approach that
allocates a significant amount of unmovable memory for user-space
purposes (excluding CMA allocations for unmovable stuff, CMA is
special): pairing it with ZONE_MOVABLE becomes very tricky as your user
space might just end up eating all kernel memory, although the system
still looks like there is plenty of free memory residing in
ZONE_MOVABLE. I mentioned that in the context of secretmem in a reduced
form as well.
We theoretically have that issue with dynamic allocation of gigantic
pages, but it's something a user explicitly/rarely triggers and it can
be documented to cause problems well enough. We'll have the same issue
with GUP+ZONE_MOVABLE that Pavel is fixing right now - but GUP is
already known to be broken in various ways and that it has to be treated
in a special way. I'd like to limit the nasty corner cases.
Of course, we could have smart rules like "don't online memory to
ZONE_MOVABLE automatically when the magic switch is active". That's just
ugly, but could work.
--
Thanks,
David / dhildenb
