Re: Xfs lockdep warning with for-dave-for-4.6 branch

[Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 02:38:22PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Wed 22-06-16 11:03:20, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 04:26:28PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > On Wed 15-06-16 17:21:54, Dave Chinner wrote:
> [...]
> > > > There are allocations outside transaction context which need to be
> > > > GFP_NOFS - this is what KM_NOFS was originally intended for.
> > > 
> > > Is it feasible to mark those by the scope NOFS api as well and drop
> > > the direct KM_NOFS usage? This should help to identify those that are
> > > lockdep only and use the annotation to prevent from the false positives.
> > 
> > I don't understand what you are suggesting here. This all started
> > because we use GFP_NOFS in a handful of places to shut up lockdep
> > and you didn't want us to use GFP_NOFS like that. Now it sounds to
> > me like you are advocating setting unconditional GFP_NOFS allocation
> > contexts for entire XFS code paths - whether it's necessary or
> > not - to avoid problems with lockdep false positives.
> 
> No, I meant only those paths which need GFP_NOFS for other than lockdep
> purposes would use the scope api.
> 
> Anyway, it seems that we are not getting closer to a desired solution
> here. Or I am not following it at least...
> 
> It seems that we have effectively two possibilities (from the
> MM/lockdep) POV. Either add an explicit API to disable the reclaim
> lockdep machinery for all allocation in a certain scope or a GFP mask
> to to achieve the same for a particular allocation. Which one would work
> better for the xfs usecase?

As I've said - if we annotate the XFS call sites appropriately (e.g.
KM_NOLOCKDEP rather than KM_NOFS), we don't care what lockdep
mechanism is used to turn off warnings as it will be wholly
encapsulated inside kmem_alloc() and friends.  This will end up
similar to how we are currently encapsulate the memalloc_noio_save()
wrappers in kmem_zalloc_large().

IOWs, it doesn't matter to XFS whether it be a GFP flag or a PF flag
here, because it's not going to be exposed to the higher level code.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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