Re: [RFC PATCH 1/2] mempool: do not consume memory reserves from the reclaim path

[Michal Hocko]

On Thu 21-07-16 08:13:00, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 10:52:03AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > Look, there are
> > $ git grep mempool_alloc | wc -l
> > 304
> > 
> > many users of this API and we do not want to flip the default behavior
> > which is there for more than 10 years. So far you have been arguing
> > about potential deadlocks and haven't shown any particular path which
> > would have a direct or indirect dependency between mempool and normal
> > allocator and it wouldn't be a bug. As the matter of fact the change
> > we are discussing here causes a regression. If you want to change the
> > semantic of mempool allocator then you are absolutely free to do so. In
> > a separate patch which would be discussed with IO people and other
> > users, though. But we _absolutely_ want to fix the regression first
> > and have a simple fix for 4.6 and 4.7 backports. At this moment there
> > are revert and patch 1 on the table.  The later one should make your
> > backtrace happy and should be only as a temporal fix until we find out
> > what is actually misbehaving on your systems. If you are not interested
> > to pursue that way I will simply go with the revert.
> 
> +1
> 
> It's very unlikely that decade-old mempool semantics are suddenly a
> fundamental livelock problem, when all the evidence we have is one
> hang and vague speculation. Given that the patch causes regressions,
> and that the bug is most likely elsewhere anyway, a full revert rather
> than merely-less-invasive mempool changes makes the most sense to me.

OK, fair enough. What do you think about the following then? Mikulas, I
have dropped your Tested-by and Reviewed-by because the patch is
different but unless you have hit the OOM killer then the testing
results should be same.
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