Re: [PATCH] memcg: page_alloc: skip bulk allocator for __GFP_ACCOUNT

[Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 3:03 PM Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 12:43:38PM -0700, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> > The commit 5c1f4e690eec ("mm/vmalloc: switch to bulk allocator in
> > __vmalloc_area_node()") switched to bulk page allocator for order 0
> > allocation backing vmalloc. However bulk page allocator does not support
> > __GFP_ACCOUNT allocations and there are several users of
> > kvmalloc(__GFP_ACCOUNT).
> >
> > For now make __GFP_ACCOUNT allocations bypass bulk page allocator. In
> > future if there is workload that can be significantly improved with the
> > bulk page allocator with __GFP_ACCCOUNT support, we can revisit the
> > decision.
> >
> > Fixes: 5c1f4e690eec ("mm/vmalloc: switch to bulk allocator in __vmalloc_area_node()")
> > Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
> > ---
> >  mm/page_alloc.c | 4 ++++
> >  1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)
> >
> > diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
> > index 668edb16446a..b3acad4615d3 100644
> > --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> > +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> > @@ -5215,6 +5215,10 @@ unsigned long __alloc_pages_bulk(gfp_t gfp, int preferred_nid,
> >       unsigned int alloc_flags = ALLOC_WMARK_LOW;
> >       int nr_populated = 0, nr_account = 0;
> >
> > +     /* Bulk allocator does not support memcg accounting. */
> > +     if (unlikely(gfp & __GFP_ACCOUNT))
> > +             goto out;
> > +
>
> Isn't it a bit too aggressive?
>
> How about
>     if (WARN_ON_ONCE(gfp & __GFP_ACCOUNT))

We actually know that kvmalloc(__GFP_ACCOUNT) users exist and can
trigger bulk page allocator through vmalloc, so I don't think the
warning would be any helpful.

>        gfp &= ~__GFP_ACCOUNT;

Bulk allocator is best effort, so callers have adequate fallbacks.
Transparently disabling accounting would be unexpected.