Re: strange PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER usage in xgbe_map_rx_buffer

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Fri 02-06-17 09:20:54, Tom Lendacky wrote:
> On 5/31/2017 11:04 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> >Hi Tom,
> 
> Hi Michal,
> 
> >I have stumbled over the following construct in xgbe_map_rx_buffer
> >	order = max_t(int, PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER - 1, 0);
> >which looks quite suspicious. Why does it PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER - 1?
> >And why do you depend on PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER at all?
> >
> 
> The driver tries to allocate a number of pages to be used as receive
> buffers.  Based on what I could find in documentation, the value of
> PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER is the point at which order allocations
> (could) get expensive.  So I decrease by one the order requested. The
> max_t test is just to insure that in case PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER ever
> gets defined as 0, 0 would be used.

So you have fallen into a carefully prepared trap ;). The thing is that
orders _larger_ than PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER are costly actually. I can
completely see how this can be confusing.

Moreover xgbe_map_rx_buffer does an atomic allocation which doesn't do
any direct reclaim/compaction attempts so the costly vs. non-costly
doesn't apply here at all.

I would be much happier if no code outside of mm used
PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER directly but that requires a deeper
consideration. E.g. what would be the largest size that would be
useful for this path? xgbe_alloc_pages does the order fallback so
PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER sounds like an artificial limit to me.
I guess we can at least simplify the xgbe right away though.
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