Re: [PATCH 2/3] profile: Suppress warning about large allocationswhen profile=1 is specified

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Thu Jul 16 2009 - 06:37:27 EST


On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:12:20AM +0900, KOSAKI Motohiro wrote:
> > When profile= is used, a large buffer is allocated early at boot. This
> > can be larger than what the page allocator can provide so it prints a
> > warning. However, the caller is able to handle the situation so this patch
> > suppresses the warning.
>
> I'm confused.
>
> Currently caller doesn't handle error return.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> asmlinkage void __init start_kernel(void)
> {
> (snip)
> init_timers();
> hrtimers_init();
> softirq_init();
> timekeeping_init();
> time_init();
> sched_clock_init();
> profile_init(); <-- ignore return value
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> and, if user want to use linus profiler, the user should choice select
> proper bucket size by boot parameter.
> Currently, allocation failure message tell user about specified bucket size
> is wrong.
> I think this patch hide it.
>

Look at what profile_init() itself is doing. You can't see it from the
patch context but when alloc_pages_exact() fails, it calls vmalloc(). If
that fails, profiling is just disabled. There isn't really anything the
caller of profile_init() can do about it and the page allocator doesn't
need to scream about it.

>
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> > kernel/profile.c | 5 +++--
> > 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> >
> > diff --git a/kernel/profile.c b/kernel/profile.c
> > index 69911b5..419250e 100644
> > --- a/kernel/profile.c
> > +++ b/kernel/profile.c
> > @@ -117,11 +117,12 @@ int __ref profile_init(void)
> >
> > cpumask_copy(prof_cpu_mask, cpu_possible_mask);
> >
> > - prof_buffer = kzalloc(buffer_bytes, GFP_KERNEL);
> > + prof_buffer = kzalloc(buffer_bytes, GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_NOWARN);
> > if (prof_buffer)
> > return 0;
> >
> > - prof_buffer = alloc_pages_exact(buffer_bytes, GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_ZERO);
> > + prof_buffer = alloc_pages_exact(buffer_bytes,
> > + GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_ZERO|__GFP_NOWARN);
> > if (prof_buffer)
> > return 0;
>
>
>

--
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/