Re: [PATCH -next] arm64/mm: fix a bogus GFP flag in pgd_alloc()

[Qian Cai]

On Mon, 2019-06-10 at 12:43 +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 03:23:38PM +0100, Mark Rutland wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 10:00:36AM -0400, Qian Cai wrote:
> > > The commit "arm64: switch to generic version of pte allocation"
> > > introduced endless failures during boot like,
> > > 
> > > kobject_add_internal failed for pgd_cache(285:chronyd.service) (error:
> > > -2 parent: cgroup)
> > > 
> > > It turns out __GFP_ACCOUNT is passed to kernel page table allocations
> > > and then later memcg finds out those don't belong to any cgroup.
> > 
> > Mike, I understood from [1] that this wasn't expected to be a problem,
> > as the accounting should bypass kernel threads.
> > 
> > Was that assumption wrong, or is something different happening here?
> > 
> > > 
> > > backtrace:
> > > Â kobject_add_internal
> > > Â kobject_init_and_add
> > > Â sysfs_slab_add+0x1a8
> > > Â __kmem_cache_create
> > > Â create_cache
> > > Â memcg_create_kmem_cache
> > > Â memcg_kmem_cache_create_func
> > > Â process_one_work
> > > Â worker_thread
> > > Â kthread
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Qian Cai <cai@xxxxxx>
> > > ---
> > > Âarch/arm64/mm/pgd.c | 2 +-
> > > Â1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
> > > 
> > > diff --git a/arch/arm64/mm/pgd.c b/arch/arm64/mm/pgd.c
> > > index 769516cb6677..53c48f5c8765 100644
> > > --- a/arch/arm64/mm/pgd.c
> > > +++ b/arch/arm64/mm/pgd.c
> > > @@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ pgd_t *pgd_alloc(struct mm_struct *mm)
> > > Â	if (PGD_SIZE == PAGE_SIZE)
> > > Â		return (pgd_t *)__get_free_page(gfp);
> > > Â	else
> > > -		return kmem_cache_alloc(pgd_cache, gfp);
> > > +		return kmem_cache_alloc(pgd_cache, GFP_PGTABLE_KERNEL);
> > 
> > This is used to allocate PGDs for both user and kernel pagetables (e.g.
> > for the efi runtime services), so while this may fix the regression, I'm
> > not sure it's the right fix.
> > 
> > Do we need a separate pgd_alloc_kernel()?
> 
> So can I take the above for -rc5, or is somebody else working on a different
> fix to implement pgd_alloc_kernel()?

The offensive commit "arm64: switch to generic version of pte allocation" is not
yet in the mainline, but only in the Andrew's tree and linux-next, and I doubt
Andrew will push this out any time sooner given it is broken.