Re: [RFC PATCH 2/2] mm/vmscan.c: Prevent allocating shrinker_info on offlined nodes

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>]

On Mon 06-12-21 11:45:54, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > This doesn't seen complete. Slab shrinkers are used in the reclaim
> > context. Previously offline nodes could be onlined later and this would
> > lead to NULL ptr because there is no hook to allocate new shrinker
> > infos. This would be also really impractical because this would have to
> > update all existing memcgs...
> 
> Instead of going through the trouble of updating...
> 
> ...  maybe just keep for_each_node() and check if the target node is
> offline. If it's offline, just allocate from the first online node.
> After all, we're not using __GFP_THISNODE, so there are no guarantees
> either way ...

This looks like another way to paper over a deeper underlying problem
IMHO. Fundamentally we have a problem that some pgdata are not allocated
and that causes a lot of headache. Not to mention that node_online
is just adding to a confusion because it doesn't really tell anything
about the logical state of the node.

I think we really should get rid of this approach rather than play a
whack-a-mole. We should really drop all notion of node_online and
instead allocate pgdat for each possible node. Arch specific code should
make sure that zone lists are properly initialized.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs