Re: [PATCH v2] mm: hugetlb: improve the handling of hugetlb allocation failure for freed or in-use hugetlb

From: Baolin Wang
Date: Mon Feb 05 2024 - 20:01:35 EST




On 2/5/2024 10:47 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Mon 05-02-24 20:50:51, Baolin Wang wrote:
When handling the freed hugetlb or in-use hugetlb, we should ignore the
failure of alloc_buddy_hugetlb_folio() to dissolve the old hugetlb successfully,
since we did not use the new allocated hugetlb in this 2 cases. Moreover,
moving the allocation into the free hugetlb handling branch.

The changelog is a bit hard for me to understand. What about the
following instead?
alloc_and_dissolve_hugetlb_folio preallocates a new huge page before it
takes hugetlb_lock. In 3 out of 4 cases the page is not really used and
therefore the newly allocated page is just freed right away. This is
wasteful and it might cause pre-mature failures in those cases.

Address that by moving the allocation down to the only case (hugetlb
page is really in the free pages pool). We need to drop hugetlb_lock
to do so and therefore need to recheck the page state after regaining
it.

The patch is more of a cleanup than an actual fix to an existing
problem. There are no known reports about pre-mature failures.

Looks better. Thanks.

@@ -3075,6 +3063,24 @@ static int alloc_and_dissolve_hugetlb_folio(struct hstate *h,
cond_resched();
goto retry;
} else {
+ if (!new_folio) {
+ spin_unlock_irq(&hugetlb_lock);
+ /*
+ * Before dissolving the free hugetlb, we need to allocate
+ * a new one for the pool to remain stable. Here, we
+ * allocate the folio and 'prep' it by doing everything
+ * but actually updating counters and adding to the pool.
+ * This simplifies and let us do most of the processing
+ * under the lock.
+ */

This comment is not really needed anymore IMHO.

Acked.


+ new_folio = alloc_buddy_hugetlb_folio(h, gfp_mask, nid,
+ NULL, NULL);
+ if (!new_folio)
+ return -ENOMEM;
+ __prep_new_hugetlb_folio(h, new_folio);
+ goto retry;
+ }
+
/*
* Ok, old_folio is still a genuine free hugepage. Remove it from
* the freelist and decrease the counters. These will be