Re: [PATCH] bcachefs: Switch to memalloc_flags_do() for vmalloc allocations

[Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@linux.dev>]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 01:08:53PM GMT, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Wed 28-08-24 18:58:43, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 28, 2024 at 09:26:44PM GMT, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > On Wed 28-08-24 15:11:19, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> [...]
> > > > It was decided _years_ ago that PF_MEMALLOC flags were how this was
> > > > going to be addressed.
> > > 
> > > Nope! It has been decided that _some_ gfp flags are acceptable to be used
> > > by scoped APIs. Most notably NOFS and NOIO are compatible with reclaim
> > > modifiers and other flags so these are indeed safe to be used that way.
> > 
> > Decided by who?
> 
> Decides semantic of respective GFP flags and their compatibility with
> others that could be nested in the scope.

Well, that's a bit of commentary, at least.

The question is which of those could properly apply to a section, not a
callsite, and a PF_MEMALLOC_NOWAIT (similar to but not exactly the same
as PF_MEMALLOC_NORECLAIM) would be at the top of that list since we
already have a clear concept of sections where we're not allowed to
sleep.

And that tells us how to resolve GFP_NOFAIL with other conflicting
PF_MEMALLOC flags: GFP_NOFAIL loses.

It is a _bug_ if GFP_NOFAIL is accidentally used in a non sleepable
context, and properly labelling those sections to the allocator would
allow us to turn undefined behaviour into an error - _that_ would be
turning kmalloc() into a safe interface.

Ergo, if you're not absolutely sure that a GFP_NOFAIL use is safe
according to call path and allocation size, you still need to be
checking for failure - in the same way that you shouldn't be using
BUG_ON() if you cannot prove that the condition won't occur in real wold
usage.

Given that, it's easy to see how to handle __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL and
__GFP_NORETRY: if they're applied to a context, then the usage is saying
"I need to attempt to run this section with some sort of latency
bounds", and GFP_NOFAIL should lose - as well as emitting a warning.

BTW, this is how you should be interpreting PF_MEMALLOC_NORECLAIM today:
"I have strong latency bounds here, but not so strict that it needs to
be strictly nonblocking".