Re: [RFC 2/2] kread: avoid duplicates

[Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>]

On Mon, Apr 17, 2023 at 05:33:49PM +0000, Edgecombe, Rick P wrote:
> On Sat, 2023-04-15 at 23:41 -0700, Luis Chamberlain wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 15, 2023 at 11:04:12PM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 10:28:40PM -0700, Luis Chamberlain wrote:
> > > > With this we run into 0 wasted virtual memory bytes.
> > > 
> > > Avoid what duplicates?
> > 
> > David Hildenbrand had reported that with over 400 CPUs vmap space
> > runs out and it seems it was related to module loading. I took a
> > look and confirmed it. Module loading ends up requiring in the
> > worst case 3 vmalloc allocations, so typically at least twice
> > the size of the module size and in the worst case just add
> > the decompressed module size:
> > 
> > a) initial kernel_read*() call
> > b) optional module decompression
> > c) the actual module data copy we will keep
> > 
> > Duplicate module requests that come from userspace end up being
> > thrown
> > in the trash bin, as only one module will be allocated.  Although
> > there
> > are checks for a module prior to requesting a module udev still
> > doesn't
> > do the best of a job to avoid that and so we end up with tons of
> > duplicate module requests. We're talking about gigabytes of vmalloc
> > bytes just lost because of this for large systems and megabytes for
> > average systems. So for example with just 255 CPUs we can loose about
> > 13.58 GiB, and for 8 CPUs about 226.53 MiB.
> > 
> > I have patches to curtail 1/2 of that space by doing a check in
> > kernel
> > before we do the allocation in c) if the module is already present.
> > For
> > a) it is harder because userspace just passes a file descriptor. But
> > since we can get the file path without the vmalloc this RFC suggest
> > maybe we can add a new kernel_read*() for module loading where it
> > makes
> > sense to have only one read happen at a time.
> 
> I'm wondering how difficult it would be to just try to remove the
> vmallocs in (a) and (b) and operate on a list of pages.

Yes I think it's worth long term to do that, if possible with seq reads.

  Luis