[PATCH 2/2] print vmalloc() state after allocation failures

From: Dave Hansen
Date: Fri Apr 08 2011 - 16:23:07 EST



I was tracking down a page allocation failure that ended up in vmalloc().
Since vmalloc() uses 0-order pages, if somebody asks for an insane amount
of memory, we'll still get a warning with "order:0" in it. That's not
very useful.

During recovery, vmalloc() also nicely frees all of the memory that it
got up to the point of the failure. That is wonderful, but it also
quickly hides any issues. We have a much different sitation if vmalloc()
repeatedly fails 10GB in to:

vmalloc(100 * 1<<30);

versus repeatedly failing 4096 bytes in to a:

vmalloc(8192);

This patch will print out messages that look like this:

[ 30.040774] bash: vmalloc failure allocating after 0 / 73728 bytes

As a side issue, I also noticed that ctl_ioctl() does vmalloc() based
solely on an unverified value passed in from userspace. Granted, it's
under CAP_SYS_ADMIN, but it still frightens me a bit.

Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---

linux-2.6.git-dave/mm/vmalloc.c | 9 +++++++--
1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff -puN mm/vmalloc.c~vmalloc-warn mm/vmalloc.c
--- linux-2.6.git/mm/vmalloc.c~vmalloc-warn 2011-04-08 09:36:05.877020199 -0700
+++ linux-2.6.git-dave/mm/vmalloc.c 2011-04-08 09:38:00.373093593 -0700
@@ -1534,6 +1534,7 @@ static void *__vmalloc_node(unsigned lon
static void *__vmalloc_area_node(struct vm_struct *area, gfp_t gfp_mask,
pgprot_t prot, int node, void *caller)
{
+ int order = 0;
struct page **pages;
unsigned int nr_pages, array_size, i;
gfp_t nested_gfp = (gfp_mask & GFP_RECLAIM_MASK) | __GFP_ZERO;
@@ -1560,11 +1561,12 @@ static void *__vmalloc_area_node(struct

for (i = 0; i < area->nr_pages; i++) {
struct page *page;
+ gfp_t tmp_mask = gfp_mask | __GFP_NOWARN;

if (node < 0)
- page = alloc_page(gfp_mask);
+ page = alloc_page(tmp_mask);
else
- page = alloc_pages_node(node, gfp_mask, 0);
+ page = alloc_pages_node(node, tmp_mask, order);

if (unlikely(!page)) {
/* Successfully allocated i pages, free them in __vunmap() */
@@ -1579,6 +1581,9 @@ static void *__vmalloc_area_node(struct
return area->addr;

fail:
+ nopage_warning(gfp_mask, order, "vmalloc: allocation failure, "
+ "allocated %ld of %ld bytes\n",
+ (area->nr_pages*PAGE_SIZE), area->size);
vfree(area->addr);
return NULL;
}
_
--
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