Re: [PATCH v4 1/4] mm/slub: enable debugging memory wasting of kmalloc

[Hyeonggon Yoo]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 03:56:15PM +0800, Feng Tang wrote:
> kmalloc's API family is critical for mm, with one nature that it will
> round up the request size to a fixed one (mostly power of 2). Say
> when user requests memory for '2^n + 1' bytes, actually 2^(n+1) bytes
> could be allocated, so in worst case, there is around 50% memory
> space waste.
> 
> The wastage is not a big issue for requests that get allocated/freed
> quickly, but may cause problems with objects that have longer life
> time.
> 
> We've met a kernel boot OOM panic (v5.10), and from the dumped slab
> info:
> 
>     [   26.062145] kmalloc-2k            814056KB     814056KB
> 
> From debug we found there are huge number of 'struct iova_magazine',
> whose size is 1032 bytes (1024 + 8), so each allocation will waste
> 1016 bytes. Though the issue was solved by giving the right (bigger)
> size of RAM, it is still nice to optimize the size (either use a
> kmalloc friendly size or create a dedicated slab for it).
> 
> And from lkml archive, there was another crash kernel OOM case [1]
> back in 2019, which seems to be related with the similar slab waste
> situation, as the log is similar:
> 
>     [    4.332648] iommu: Adding device 0000:20:02.0 to group 16
>     [    4.338946] swapper/0 invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x6040c0(GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_COMP), nodemask=(null), order=0, oom_score_adj=0
>     ...
>     [    4.857565] kmalloc-2048           59164KB      59164KB
> 
> The crash kernel only has 256M memory, and 59M is pretty big here.
> (Note: the related code has been changed and optimised in recent
> kernel [2], these logs are just picked to demo the problem, also
> a patch changing its size to 1024 bytes has been merged)
> 
> So add an way to track each kmalloc's memory waste info, and
> leverage the existing SLUB debug framework (specifically
> SLUB_STORE_USER) to show its call stack of original allocation,
> so that user can evaluate the waste situation, identify some hot
> spots and optimize accordingly, for a better utilization of memory.
> 
> The waste info is integrated into existing interface:
> '/sys/kernel/debug/slab/kmalloc-xx/alloc_traces', one example of
> 'kmalloc-4k' after boot is:
> 
> 126 ixgbe_alloc_q_vector+0xa5/0x4a0 [ixgbe] waste=233856/1856 age=1493302/1493830/1494358 pid=1284 cpus=32 nodes=1
>         __slab_alloc.isra.86+0x52/0x80
>         __kmalloc_node+0x143/0x350
>         ixgbe_alloc_q_vector+0xa5/0x4a0 [ixgbe]
>         ixgbe_init_interrupt_scheme+0x1a6/0x730 [ixgbe]
>         ixgbe_probe+0xc8e/0x10d0 [ixgbe]
>         local_pci_probe+0x42/0x80
>         work_for_cpu_fn+0x13/0x20
>         process_one_work+0x1c5/0x390
> 
> which means in 'kmalloc-4k' slab, there are 126 requests of
> 2240 bytes which got a 4KB space (wasting 1856 bytes each
> and 233856 bytes in total). And when system starts some real
> workload like multiple docker instances, there are more
> severe waste.
> 
> [1]. https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/12/266
> [2]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2920df89-9975-5785-f79b-257d3052dfaf@xxxxxxxxxx/
> 
> [Thanks Hyeonggon for pointing out several bugs about sorting/format]
> [Thanks Vlastimil for suggesting way to reduce memory usage of
>  orig_size and keep it only for kmalloc objects]
> 
> Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@xxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@xxxxxxx>
> Cc: John Garry <john.garry@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Kefeng Wang <wangkefeng.wang@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  include/linux/slab.h |  2 +
>  mm/slub.c            | 94 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------
>  2 files changed, 81 insertions(+), 15 deletions(-)


Would you update Documentation/mm/slub.rst as well?
(alloc_traces part)

[...]

>   */
>  static void *___slab_alloc(struct kmem_cache *s, gfp_t gfpflags, int node,
> -			  unsigned long addr, struct kmem_cache_cpu *c)
> +			  unsigned long addr, struct kmem_cache_cpu *c, unsigned int orig_size)
>  {
>  	void *freelist;
>  	struct slab *slab;
> @@ -3115,6 +3158,7 @@ static void *___slab_alloc(struct kmem_cache *s, gfp_t gfpflags, int node,
>  
>  		if (s->flags & SLAB_STORE_USER)
>  			set_track(s, freelist, TRACK_ALLOC, addr);
> +		set_orig_size(s, freelist, orig_size);
>  
>  		return freelist;
>  	}
> @@ -3140,6 +3184,8 @@ static void *___slab_alloc(struct kmem_cache *s, gfp_t gfpflags, int node,
>  		 */
>  		if (s->flags & SLAB_STORE_USER)
>  			set_track(s, freelist, TRACK_ALLOC, addr);
> +		set_orig_size(s, freelist, orig_size);
> +
>  		return freelist;
>  	}


This patch is okay but with patch 4, init_object() initializes redzone/poison area
using s->object_size, and init_kmalloc_object() fixes redzone/poison area using orig_size.
Why not do it in init_object() in the first time?

Also, updating redzone/poison area after alloc_single_from_new_slab()
(outside list_lock, after adding slab to list) will introduce races with validation.

So I think doing set_orig_size()/init_kmalloc_object() in alloc_debug_processing() would make more sense.

I can miss something, please kindly let me know if I did ;)

Anything else looks good to me.
Thanks!

-- 
Thanks,
Hyeonggon