On Thu 13-04-23 11:05:20, Pavel Tatashin wrote: > On Wed, Apr 12, 2023 at 4:18 PM Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > On Wed 12-04-23 13:13:02, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > Lots of questions (ie, missing information!) > > > > > > On Wed, 12 Apr 2023 19:59:39 +0000 Pasha Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > > HugeTLB pages have a struct page optimizations where struct pages for tail > > > > pages are freed. However, when HugeTLB pages are destroyed, the memory for > > > > struct pages (vmemmap) need to be allocated again. > > > > > > > > Currently, __GFP_NORETRY flag is used to allocate the memory for vmemmap, > > > > but given that this flag makes very little effort to actually reclaim > > > > memory the returning of huge pages back to the system can be problem. > > > > > > Are there any reports of this happening in the real world? > > > > > > > Lets > > > > use __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL instead. This flag is also performs graceful > > > > reclaim without causing ooms, but at least it may perform a few retries, > > > > and will fail only when there is genuinely little amount of unused memory > > > > in the system. > > > > > > If so, does this change help? > > > > > > If the allocation attempt fails, what are the consequences? > > > > > > What are the potential downsides to this change? Why did we choose > > > __GFP_NORETRY in the first place? > > > > > > What happens if we try harder (eg, GFP_KERNEL)? > > > > Mike was generous enough to make me remember > > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/YCafit5ruRJ+SL8I@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/. > > GFP_KERNEL wouldn't make much difference becauset this is > > __GFP_THISNODE. But I do agree that the changelog should go into more > > details about why do we want to try harder now. I can imagine that > > shrinking hugetlb pool by a large amount of hugetlb pages might become a > > problem but is this really happening or is this a theoretical concern? > > This is a theoretical concern. Freeing a 1G page requires 16M of free > memory. A machine might need to be reconfigured from one task to > another, and release a large number of 1G pages back to the system if > allocating 16M fails, the release won't work. This is really an important "detail" changelog should mention. While I am not really against that change I would much rather see that as a result of a real world fix rather than a theoretical concern. Mostly because a real life scenario would allow us to test the __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL effectivness. As that request might fail as well we just end up with a theoretical fix for a theoretical problem. Something that is easy to introduce but much harder to get rid of should we ever need to change __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL implementation for example. > In an ideal scenario we should guarantee that this never fails: that > we always can free HugeTLB pages back to the system. At the very least > we could steal the memory for vmemmap from the page that is being > released. Yes, this really bothered me when the concept was introduced initially. I am always concerned when you need to allocate in order to free memory. Practically speaking we haven't heard about bug reports so maybe this is not such a big deal as I thought. -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs
