On 2023/2/16 16:37, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Thu 16-02-23 16:21:54, Qi Zheng wrote:
On 2023/2/16 15:51, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Thu 16-02-23 07:11:19, Qi Zheng wrote:
On 2023/2/16 00:36, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Wed 15-02-23 23:24:10, Qi Zheng wrote:
Hi all,
Currently, in the process of initialization or offline memory, memoryless
nodes will still be built into the fallback list of itself or other nodes.
This is not what we expected, so this patch series removes memoryless
nodes from the fallback list entirely.
Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Hi Michal,
This is a tricky area full of surprises and it is really easy to
Would you mind giving an example of a "new problem"?
The initialization is spread over several places and it is quite easy to
introduce bugs because it is hard to review this area. Been there done
that. Just look into the git log.
I understand your concern, but should we therefore reject all revisions
to this?
No, but either somebode is willing to invest a non-trivial amount of
time and unify the NUMA initialization code that is spread over arch
specific code in different places or we should just focus on addressing
bugs.
introduce new problems. What kind of problem/issue are you trying to
solve/handle by these changes?
IIUC, I think there are two reasons:
Firstly, as mentioned in commit message, the memoryless node has no
memory to allocate (If it can be allocated, it may also cause the panic
I mentioned in [1]), so we should not continue to traverse it when
allocating memory at runtime, which will have a certain overhead.
Sure that is not the most optimal implementation but does this matter in
practice? Can you observe any actual measurable performance penalty?
No, and the original reason for noticing this place was the panic I
mentioned in [1] (< NODE_MIN_SIZE). And if we had handled the memoryless
node's zonelist correctly before, we wouldn't have had that panic at
all.
Yes, this is another good example of how subtle the code is. Mike has
posted a patch that simply drops the NODE_MIN_SIZE constrain and I
believe that is the right thing to do at this stage. There is a non-zero
risk of regression but at least we will be forced to fix the original
problem properly or at least document is properly.
Currently we are just sacrificing some tiny performance for a
simplicity.
Hmm, I don't think my modification complicates the code.
Secondly, from the perspective of semantic correctness, why do we remove
the memoryless node from the fallback list of other normal nodes
(N_MEMORY), but not from its own fallback list (PATCH[1/2])? Why should
an upcoming memoryless node continue exist in the fallback list of
itself and other normal nodes (PATCH[2/2])?
I am not sure I follow. What is the semantic correctness issue?
Sorry for the ambiguity, what I meant was that memoryless nodes should
never have been built into any fallback list, not just for performance
optimizations.
Well, I am not 100% sure I agree with you here. The performance would be
the only reason why to drop those nodes from zonelists. Other than that
zonelists are a useful abstraction for the node distance ordering. Even
if those nodes do not have any memory at all in principle there is no
big difference from depleted nodes.
I see what you mean, no more code for no more bugs (in cases where is no
obvious gain). But I still feel that the current implementation is
rather weird (deleted some, and kept some), and my changes are actually
very small.
Anyway, let's wait for other people's opinions. :)
--
Thanks,
Qi
