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authorMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>2017-07-13 00:36:45 +0300
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2017-07-13 02:26:03 +0300
commitdcda9b04713c3f6ff0875652924844fae28286ea (patch)
tree0aa6dd3854b67e881e8be74283f0ae6ff96245ac /include/linux/gfp.h
parent473738eb78c3e379d682fb8a3cf7e1d17beded9f (diff)
downloadlinux-dcda9b04713c3f6ff0875652924844fae28286ea.tar.xz
mm, tree wide: replace __GFP_REPEAT by __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL with more useful semantic
__GFP_REPEAT was designed to allow retry-but-eventually-fail semantic to the page allocator. This has been true but only for allocations requests larger than PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER. It has been always ignored for smaller sizes. This is a bit unfortunate because there is no way to express the same semantic for those requests and they are considered too important to fail so they might end up looping in the page allocator for ever, similarly to GFP_NOFAIL requests. Now that the whole tree has been cleaned up and accidental or misled usage of __GFP_REPEAT flag has been removed for !costly requests we can give the original flag a better name and more importantly a more useful semantic. Let's rename it to __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL which tells the user that the allocator would try really hard but there is no promise of a success. This will work independent of the order and overrides the default allocator behavior. Page allocator users have several levels of guarantee vs. cost options (take GFP_KERNEL as an example) - GFP_KERNEL & ~__GFP_RECLAIM - optimistic allocation without _any_ attempt to free memory at all. The most light weight mode which even doesn't kick the background reclaim. Should be used carefully because it might deplete the memory and the next user might hit the more aggressive reclaim - GFP_KERNEL & ~__GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM (or GFP_NOWAIT)- optimistic allocation without any attempt to free memory from the current context but can wake kswapd to reclaim memory if the zone is below the low watermark. Can be used from either atomic contexts or when the request is a performance optimization and there is another fallback for a slow path. - (GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_HIGH) & ~__GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM (aka GFP_ATOMIC) - non sleeping allocation with an expensive fallback so it can access some portion of memory reserves. Usually used from interrupt/bh context with an expensive slow path fallback. - GFP_KERNEL - both background and direct reclaim are allowed and the _default_ page allocator behavior is used. That means that !costly allocation requests are basically nofail but there is no guarantee of that behavior so failures have to be checked properly by callers (e.g. OOM killer victim is allowed to fail currently). - GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NORETRY - overrides the default allocator behavior and all allocation requests fail early rather than cause disruptive reclaim (one round of reclaim in this implementation). The OOM killer is not invoked. - GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL - overrides the default allocator behavior and all allocation requests try really hard. The request will fail if the reclaim cannot make any progress. The OOM killer won't be triggered. - GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NOFAIL - overrides the default allocator behavior and all allocation requests will loop endlessly until they succeed. This might be really dangerous especially for larger orders. Existing users of __GFP_REPEAT are changed to __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL because they already had their semantic. No new users are added. __alloc_pages_slowpath is changed to bail out for __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL if there is no progress and we have already passed the OOM point. This means that all the reclaim opportunities have been exhausted except the most disruptive one (the OOM killer) and a user defined fallback behavior is more sensible than keep retrying in the page allocator. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix arch/sparc/kernel/mdesc.c] [mhocko@suse.com: semantic fix] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170626123847.GM11534@dhcp22.suse.cz [mhocko@kernel.org: address other thing spotted by Vlastimil] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170626124233.GN11534@dhcp22.suse.cz Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170623085345.11304-3-mhocko@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Cc: Alex Belits <alex.belits@cavium.com> Cc: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Cc: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com> Cc: David Daney <david.daney@cavium.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.com> Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'include/linux/gfp.h')
-rw-r--r--include/linux/gfp.h56
1 files changed, 43 insertions, 13 deletions
diff --git a/include/linux/gfp.h b/include/linux/gfp.h
index 4c6656f1fee7..bcfb9f7c46f5 100644
--- a/include/linux/gfp.h
+++ b/include/linux/gfp.h
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ struct vm_area_struct;
#define ___GFP_FS 0x80u
#define ___GFP_COLD 0x100u
#define ___GFP_NOWARN 0x200u
-#define ___GFP_REPEAT 0x400u
+#define ___GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL 0x400u
#define ___GFP_NOFAIL 0x800u
#define ___GFP_NORETRY 0x1000u
#define ___GFP_MEMALLOC 0x2000u
@@ -136,26 +136,56 @@ struct vm_area_struct;
*
* __GFP_RECLAIM is shorthand to allow/forbid both direct and kswapd reclaim.
*
- * __GFP_REPEAT: Try hard to allocate the memory, but the allocation attempt
- * _might_ fail. This depends upon the particular VM implementation.
+ * The default allocator behavior depends on the request size. We have a concept
+ * of so called costly allocations (with order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER).
+ * !costly allocations are too essential to fail so they are implicitly
+ * non-failing by default (with some exceptions like OOM victims might fail so
+ * the caller still has to check for failures) while costly requests try to be
+ * not disruptive and back off even without invoking the OOM killer.
+ * The following three modifiers might be used to override some of these
+ * implicit rules
+ *
+ * __GFP_NORETRY: The VM implementation will try only very lightweight
+ * memory direct reclaim to get some memory under memory pressure (thus
+ * it can sleep). It will avoid disruptive actions like OOM killer. The
+ * caller must handle the failure which is quite likely to happen under
+ * heavy memory pressure. The flag is suitable when failure can easily be
+ * handled at small cost, such as reduced throughput
+ *
+ * __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL: The VM implementation will retry memory reclaim
+ * procedures that have previously failed if there is some indication
+ * that progress has been made else where. It can wait for other
+ * tasks to attempt high level approaches to freeing memory such as
+ * compaction (which removes fragmentation) and page-out.
+ * There is still a definite limit to the number of retries, but it is
+ * a larger limit than with __GFP_NORETRY.
+ * Allocations with this flag may fail, but only when there is
+ * genuinely little unused memory. While these allocations do not
+ * directly trigger the OOM killer, their failure indicates that
+ * the system is likely to need to use the OOM killer soon. The
+ * caller must handle failure, but can reasonably do so by failing
+ * a higher-level request, or completing it only in a much less
+ * efficient manner.
+ * If the allocation does fail, and the caller is in a position to
+ * free some non-essential memory, doing so could benefit the system
+ * as a whole.
*
* __GFP_NOFAIL: The VM implementation _must_ retry infinitely: the caller
- * cannot handle allocation failures. New users should be evaluated carefully
- * (and the flag should be used only when there is no reasonable failure
- * policy) but it is definitely preferable to use the flag rather than
- * opencode endless loop around allocator.
- *
- * __GFP_NORETRY: The VM implementation must not retry indefinitely and will
- * return NULL when direct reclaim and memory compaction have failed to allow
- * the allocation to succeed. The OOM killer is not called with the current
- * implementation.
+ * cannot handle allocation failures. The allocation could block
+ * indefinitely but will never return with failure. Testing for
+ * failure is pointless.
+ * New users should be evaluated carefully (and the flag should be
+ * used only when there is no reasonable failure policy) but it is
+ * definitely preferable to use the flag rather than opencode endless
+ * loop around allocator.
+ * Using this flag for costly allocations is _highly_ discouraged.
*/
#define __GFP_IO ((__force gfp_t)___GFP_IO)
#define __GFP_FS ((__force gfp_t)___GFP_FS)
#define __GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM ((__force gfp_t)___GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM) /* Caller can reclaim */
#define __GFP_KSWAPD_RECLAIM ((__force gfp_t)___GFP_KSWAPD_RECLAIM) /* kswapd can wake */
#define __GFP_RECLAIM ((__force gfp_t)(___GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM|___GFP_KSWAPD_RECLAIM))
-#define __GFP_REPEAT ((__force gfp_t)___GFP_REPEAT)
+#define __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL ((__force gfp_t)___GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL)
#define __GFP_NOFAIL ((__force gfp_t)___GFP_NOFAIL)
#define __GFP_NORETRY ((__force gfp_t)___GFP_NORETRY)