Re: [patch] mm, slab: suppress out of memory warning unless debug is enabled

[David Rientjes]

On Wed, 7 May 2014, Andrew Morton wrote:

> > When the slab or slub allocators cannot allocate additional slab pages, they 
> > emit diagnostic information to the kernel log such as current number of slabs, 
> > number of objects, active objects, etc.  This is always coupled with a page 
> > allocation failure warning since it is controlled by !__GFP_NOWARN.
> > 
> > Suppress this out of memory warning if the allocator is configured without debug 
> > supported.  The page allocation failure warning will indicate it is a failed 
> > slab allocation, so this is only useful to diagnose allocator bugs.
> > 
> > Since CONFIG_SLUB_DEBUG is already enabled by default for the slub allocator, 
> > there is no functional change with this patch.  If debug is disabled, however, 
> > the warnings are now suppressed.
> > 
> 
> I'm not seeing any reason for making this change.
> 

You think the spam in http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=139927773010514 
is meaningful?  It also looks like two different errors when in reality it 
is a single allocation.

Unless you're debugging a slab issue, all the pertinent information is 
already available in the page allocation failure warning emitted by the 
page allocator: we already have the order and gfp mask.  We also know it's 
a slab allocation because of the __kmalloc in the call trace.

Does this user care about that there are 207 slabs on node 0 with 207 
objects?  Probably only if they are diagnosing a slab problem.

> > @@ -1621,11 +1621,17 @@ __initcall(cpucache_init);
> >  static noinline void
> >  slab_out_of_memory(struct kmem_cache *cachep, gfp_t gfpflags, int nodeid)
> >  {
> > +#if DEBUG
> >  	struct kmem_cache_node *n;
> >  	struct page *page;
> >  	unsigned long flags;
> >  	int node;
> >  
> > +	if (gfpflags & __GFP_NOWARN)
> > +		return;
> > +	if (!printk_ratelimit())
> > +		return;
> 
> printk_ratelimit() is lame - it uses a single global state.  So if
> random net driver is using printk_ratelimit(), that driver and slab
> will interfere with each other.
> 

Agreed, but it is a testiment to the uselessness of this information 
already.  The page allocation failure warnings are controlled by their own 
ratelimiter, nopage_rs, but that's local to the page allocator.  Do you 
prefer that all these ratelimiters be moved to the global namespace for 
generic use?
--
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/