RE: [lustre-devel] LIBCFS_ALLOC

[Simmons, James A.]

>> >Yeah.  You're right.  Doing a vmalloc() when kmalloc() doesn't have even
>> >a tiny sliver of RAM isn't going to work.  It's easier to use
>> >libcfs_kvzalloc() everywhere, but it's probably the wrong thing.
>>
>> The original  reason we have the vmalloc water mark wasn't so much the
>> issue of memory exhaustion but to handle the case of memory fragmentation.
>> Some sites had after a extended period of time started to see failures of
>> allocating even 32K using kmalloc.  In our latest development branch we moved
>> away from using a water mark to always try kmalloc first and if it fails then we
>> try vmalloc. At ORNL we ran into severe performance issues when we entered
>> vmalloc territory. It has been discussed before on what might replace vmalloc
>> handling in the case of kmalloc fails but no solution has been worked out.
>
>OK, but if a structure contains only 4 words, would it be better to just
>use kzalloc?  Or does it not matter?  It would only save trying vmalloc in
>a case that it is guaranteed to fail, but if a structure with 4 words
>can't be allocated, the system has other problems.  Another argument is
>that kzalloc is a well known function that people and bug-finding tools
>understand, so it is better to use it whenever possible.
>
>Some of the other structures contain a lot more fields, as well as small
>arrays.  They are probably acceptable for kzalloc too, but I wouldn't know
>the exact dividing line.

The reason I bring this up is to discuss sorting this out. Once long ago we had
just  LIBCFS_ALLOC. For some reason before my time OBD_ALLOC got spawned
off of that.  Currently LIBCFS_ALLOC is used just by the libcfs/LNet layer. Now 
OBD_ALLOC in our development branch has moved to a try kmalloc first and 
if it fails try vmalloc for any size memory allocation.  LIBCFS_ALLOC still does the
original approach.   So we have two possible solutions depending on if libcfs/LNet
needs to ever do a vmalloc.

One solution if libcfs/LNet never needs a vmalloc is remove LIBCFS_ALLOC and replace
it with kzalloc everywhere. We can then move libcfs_kzvalloc to the lustre layer and
port the change we did in the development branch to here of the try kmalloc then
vmalloc approach. 

The other approach is if libcfs/LNet does in some case need to use vmalloc we could 
then update LIBCFS_ALLOC to first try kmalloc then vmalloc. Once this is implemented
we can nuke the OBD_ALLOC system.

Either way I like to see it consolidated down to one system.
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