Re: [RFC] can we use vmalloc to alloc thread stack if compaction failed

[Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 3:51 AM, Xishi Qiu <qiuxishi@huawei.com> wrote:
> On 2016/7/28 17:43, Michal Hocko wrote:
>
>> On Thu 28-07-16 16:45:06, Xishi Qiu wrote:
>>> On 2016/7/28 15:58, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu 28-07-16 15:41:53, Xishi Qiu wrote:
>>>>> On 2016/7/28 15:20, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Thu 28-07-16 15:08:26, Xishi Qiu wrote:
>>>>>>> Usually THREAD_SIZE_ORDER is 2, it means we need to alloc 16kb continuous
>>>>>>> physical memory during fork a new process.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> If the system's memory is very small, especially the smart phone, maybe there
>>>>>>> is only 1G memory. So the free memory is very small and compaction is not
>>>>>>> always success in slowpath(__alloc_pages_slowpath), then alloc thread stack
>>>>>>> may be failed for memory fragment.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Well, with the current implementation of the page allocator those
>>>>>> requests will not fail in most cases. The oom killer would be invoked in
>>>>>> order to free up some memory.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi Michal,
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, it success in most cases, but I did have seen this problem in some
>>>>> stress-test.
>>>>>
>>>>> DMA free:470628kB, but alloc 2 order block failed during fork a new process.
>>>>> There are so many memory fragments and the large block may be soon taken by
>>>>> others after compact because of stress-test.
>>>>>
>>>>> --- dmesg messages ---
>>>>> 07-13 08:41:51.341 <4>[309805.658142s][pid:1361,cpu5,sManagerService]sManagerService: page allocation failure: order:2, mode:0x2000d1
>>>>
>>>> Yes but this is __GFP_DMA allocation. I guess you have already reported
>>>> this failure and you've been told that this is quite unexpected for the
>>>> kernel stack allocation. It is your out-of-tree patch which just makes
>>>> things worse because DMA restricted allocations are considered "lowmem"
>>>> and so they do not invoke OOM killer and do not retry like regular
>>>> GFP_KERNEL allocations.
>>>
>>> Hi Michal,
>>>
>>> Yes, we add GFP_DMA, but I don't think this is the key for the problem.
>>
>> You are restricting the allocation request to a single zone which is
>> definitely not good. Look at how many larger order pages are available
>> in the Normal zone.
>>
>>> If we do oom-killer, maybe we will get a large block later, but there
>>> is enough free memory before oom(although most of them are fragments).
>>
>> Killing a task is of course the last resort action. It would give you
>> larger order blocks used for the victims thread.
>>
>>> I wonder if we can alloc success without kill any process in this situation.
>>
>> Sure it would be preferable to compact that memory but that might be
>> hard with your restriction in place. Consider that DMA zone would tend
>> to be less movable than normal zones as users would have to pin it for
>> DMA. Your DMA is really large so this might turn out to just happen to
>> work but note that the primary problem here is that you put a zone
>> restriction for your allocations.
>>
>>> Maybe use vmalloc is a good way, but I don't know the influence.
>>
>> You can have a look at vmalloc patches posted by Andy. They are not that
>> trivial.
>>
>
> Hi Michal,
>
> Thank you for your comment, could you give me the link?
>

I've been keeping it mostly up to date in this branch:

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/luto/linux.git/log/?h=x86/vmap_stack

It's currently out of sync due to a bunch of the patches being queued
elsewhere for the merge window.

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