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  • Michal Hocko's avatar
    MIPS: do not use __GFP_REPEAT for order-0 request · 473738eb
    Michal Hocko authored
    Patch series "mm: give __GFP_REPEAT a better semantic".
    
    The main motivation for the change is that the current implementation of
    __GFP_REPEAT is not very much useful.
    
    The documentation says:
     * __GFP_REPEAT: Try hard to allocate the memory, but the allocation attempt
     *   _might_ fail.  This depends upon the particular VM implementation.
    
    It just fails to mention that this is true only for large (costly) high
    order which has been the case since the flag was introduced.  A similar
    semantic would be really helpful for smal orders as well, though,
    because we have places where a failure with a specific fallback error
    handling is preferred to a potential endless loop inside the page
    allocator.
    
    The earlier cleanup dropped __GFP_REPEAT usage for low (!costly) order
    users so only those which might use larger orders have stayed.  One new
    user added in the meantime is addressed in patch 1.
    
    Let's rename the flag to something more verbose and use it for existing
    users.  Semantic for those will not change.  Then implement low
    (!costly) orders failure path which is hit after the page allocator is
    about to invoke the oom killer.  With that we have a good counterpart
    for __GFP_NORETRY and finally can tell try as hard as possible without
    the OOM killer.
    
    Xfs code already has an existing annotation for allocations which are
    allowed to fail and we can trivially map them to the new gfp flag
    because it will provide the semantic KM_MAYFAIL wants.  Christoph didn't
    consider the new flag really necessary but didn't respond to the OOM
    killer aspect of the change so I have kept the patch.  If this is still
    seen as not really needed I can drop the patch.
    
    kvmalloc will allow also !costly high order allocations to retry hard
    before falling back to the vmalloc.
    
    drm/i915 asked for the new semantic explicitly.
    
    Memory migration code, especially for the memory hotplug, should back
    off rather than invoking the OOM killer as well.
    
    This patch (of 6):
    
    Commit 3377e227 ("MIPS: Add 48-bit VA space (and 4-level page
    tables) for 4K pages.") has added a new __GFP_REPEAT user but using this
    flag doesn't really make any sense for order-0 request which is the case
    here because PUD_ORDER is 0.  __GFP_REPEAT has historically effect only
    on allocation requests with order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER.
    
    This doesn't introduce any functional change.  This is a preparatory
    patch for later work which renames the flag and redefines its semantic.
    
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170623085345.11304-2-mhocko@kernel.org
    
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
    Cc: Alex Belits <alex.belits@cavium.com>
    Cc: David Daney <david.daney@cavium.com>
    Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
    Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
    Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
    Cc: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.com>
    Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
    Cc: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
    Cc: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    473738eb