Re: [PATCH v1] mm/vmalloc: fix exact allocations with an alignment > 1

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Wed Sep 29 2021 - 12:10:44 EST


On 29.09.21 18:08, Uladzislau Rezki wrote:
Could you please to be more specific? I mean how is it connected with huge
pages mappings? Huge-pages are which have order > 0. Or you mean that
a special alignments are needed for mapping huge pages?

Let me try to clarify:


KASAN does an exact allocation when onlining a memory block,
__vmalloc_node_range() will try placing huge pages first, increasing the
alignment to e.g., "1 << PMD_SHIFT".

If we increase the search length in find_vmap_lowest_match(), that
search will fail if the exact allocation is surrounded by other
allocations. In that case, we won't place a huge page although we could
-- because find_vmap_lowest_match() would be imprecise for alignments >
PAGE_SIZE.


Memory blocks we online/offline on x86 are at least 128MB. The KASAN
"overhead" we have to allocate is 1/8 of that -- 16 MB, so essentially 8
huge pages.

__vmalloc_node_range() will increase the alignment to 2MB to try placing
huge pages first. find_vmap_lowest_match() will search within the given
exact 16MB are a 18MB area (size + align), which won't work. So
__vmalloc_node_range() will fallback to the original PAGE_SIZE alignment
and shift=PAGE_SHIFT.

__vmalloc_area_node() will set the set_vm_area_page_order effectively to
0 -- small pages.

Does that make sense or am I missing something?

Thank you for clarification. OK, we come back anyway to the "problem" with fixed
range and an exact allocation plus a special alignment > PAGE_SIZE. Thus the
KASAN will not make use of huge pages mappings and go with regular instead
as a fallback path. But we would like to utilize huge-mappings for KASAN.

I will send the patch you tested and add your "tested-by" tag. Does it
sound good?

Feel free to add

Tested-by: David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks!

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb