Re: [PATCH v3] mlx4_core: allocate ICM memory in page size chunks

[Eric Dumazet]

On 05/17/2018 01:53 PM, Qing Huang wrote:
> When a system is under memory presure (high usage with fragments),
> the original 256KB ICM chunk allocations will likely trigger kernel
> memory management to enter slow path doing memory compact/migration
> ops in order to complete high order memory allocations.
> 
> When that happens, user processes calling uverb APIs may get stuck
> for more than 120s easily even though there are a lot of free pages
> in smaller chunks available in the system.
> 
> Syslog:
> ...
> Dec 10 09:04:51 slcc03db02 kernel: [397078.572732] INFO: task
> oracle_205573_e:205573 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
> ...
> 


NACK on this patch.

You have been asked repeatedly to use kvmalloc()

This is not a minor suggestion.

Take a look at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d8c13f2271ec5178c52fbde072ec7b562651ed9d

And you'll understand some people care about this.

Strongly.

Thanks.