Re: [PATCH] vmalloc: add warning in __vmalloc

[Nick Piggin]

On 3 May 2012 15:46, Sage Weil <sage@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 3 May 2012, Minchan Kim wrote:
>> On 05/03/2012 04:46 AM, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> > Well. ÂWhat are we actually doing here? ÂCausing the kernel to spew a
>> > warning due to known-buggy callsites, so that users will report the
>> > warnings, eventually goading maintainers into fixing their stuff.
>> >
>> > This isn't very efficient :(
>>
>>
>> Yes. I hope maintainers fix it before merging this.
>>
>> >
>> > It would be better to fix that stuff first, then add the warning to
>> > prevent reoccurrences. ÂYes, maintainers are very naughty and probably
>> > do need cattle prods^W^W warnings to motivate them to fix stuff, but we
>> > should first make an effort to get these things fixed without
>> > irritating and alarming our users.
>> >
>> > Where are these offending callsites?
>
> Okay, maybe this is a stupid question, but: if an fs can't call vmalloc
> with GFP_NOFS without risking deadlock, calling with GFP_KERNEL instead
> doesn't fix anything (besides being more honest). ÂThis really means that
> vmalloc is effectively off-limits for file systems in any
> writeback-related path, right?

Anywhere it cannot reenter the filesystem, yes. GFP_NOFS is effectively
GFP_KERNEL when calling vmalloc.

Note that in writeback paths, a "good citizen" filesystem should not require
any allocations, or at least it should be able to tolerate allocation failures.
So fixing that would be a good idea anyway.
--
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/