Re: [PATCH 3/6] xfs: map KM_MAYFAIL to __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL

[Michal Hocko]

Christoph, Darrick
could you have a look at this patch please? Andrew has put it into mmotm
but I definitely do not want it passes your attention.

On Fri 23-06-17 10:53:42, Michal Hocko wrote:
> From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
> 
> KM_MAYFAIL didn't have any suitable GFP_FOO counterpart until recently
> so it relied on the default page allocator behavior for the given set
> of flags. This means that small allocations actually never failed.
> 
> Now that we have __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL flag which works independently on the
> allocation request size we can map KM_MAYFAIL to it. The allocator will
> try as hard as it can to fulfill the request but fails eventually if
> the progress cannot be made. It does so without triggering the OOM
> killer which can be seen as an improvement because KM_MAYFAIL users
> should be able to deal with allocation failures.
> 
> Cc: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  fs/xfs/kmem.h | 10 ++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/fs/xfs/kmem.h b/fs/xfs/kmem.h
> index d6ea520162b2..4d85992d75b2 100644
> --- a/fs/xfs/kmem.h
> +++ b/fs/xfs/kmem.h
> @@ -54,6 +54,16 @@ kmem_flags_convert(xfs_km_flags_t flags)
>  			lflags &= ~__GFP_FS;
>  	}
>  
> +	/*
> +	 * Default page/slab allocator behavior is to retry for ever
> +	 * for small allocations. We can override this behavior by using
> +	 * __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL which will tell the allocator to retry as long
> +	 * as it is feasible but rather fail than retry forever for all
> +	 * request sizes.
> +	 */
> +	if (flags & KM_MAYFAIL)
> +		lflags |= __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL;
> +
>  	if (flags & KM_ZERO)
>  		lflags |= __GFP_ZERO;
>  
> -- 
> 2.11.0
> 

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs