On Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 12:58:33AM +0800, Chunyu Hu wrote:
> __GFP_NORETRY and __GFP_NOFAIL are combined in gfp_kmemleak_mask now.
> But it's a wrong combination. As __GFP_NOFAIL is blockable, but
> __GFP_NORETY is not blockable, make it self-contradiction.
>
> __GFP_NOFAIL means 'The VM implementation _must_ retry infinitely'. But
> it's not the real intention, as kmemleak allow alloc failure happen in
> memory pressure, in that case kmemleak just disables itself.
Good point. The __GFP_NOFAIL flag was added by commit d9570ee3bd1d
("kmemleak: allow to coexist with fault injection") to keep kmemleak
usable under fault injection.
> commit 9a67f6488eca ("mm: consolidate GFP_NOFAIL checks in the allocator
> slowpath") documented that what user wants here should use GFP_NOWAIT, and
> the WARN in __alloc_pages_slowpath caught this weird usage.
>
> <snip>
> WARNING: CPU: 3 PID: 64 at mm/page_alloc.c:4261 __alloc_pages_slowpath+0x1cc3/0x2780
[...]
> Replace the __GFP_NOFAIL with GFP_NOWAIT in gfp_kmemleak_mask, __GFP_NORETRY
> and GFP_NOWAIT are in the gfp_kmemleak_mask. So kmemleak object allocaion
> is no blockable and no reclaim, making kmemleak less disruptive to user
> processes in pressure.
It doesn't solve the fault injection problem for kmemleak (unless we
change __should_failslab() somehow, not sure yet). An option would be to
replace __GFP_NORETRY with __GFP_NOFAIL in kmemleak when fault injection
is enabled.
BTW, does the combination of NOWAIT and NORETRY make kmemleak
allocations more likely to fail?
Cc'ing Dmitry as well.
> Signed-off-by: Chunyu Hu <chuhu@xxxxxxxxxx>
> CC: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
> ---
> mm/kmemleak.c | 2 +-
> 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/mm/kmemleak.c b/mm/kmemleak.c
> index 9a085d5..4ea07e4 100644
> --- a/mm/kmemleak.c
> +++ b/mm/kmemleak.c
> @@ -126,7 +126,7 @@
> /* GFP bitmask for kmemleak internal allocations */
> #define gfp_kmemleak_mask(gfp) (((gfp) & (GFP_KERNEL | GFP_ATOMIC)) | \
> __GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_NOMEMALLOC | \
> - __GFP_NOWARN | __GFP_NOFAIL)
> + __GFP_NOWARN | GFP_NOWAIT)
>
> /* scanning area inside a memory block */
> struct kmemleak_scan_area {
> --
> 1.8.3.1
