Re: Regression from 2.6.36

[Eric Dumazet]

Le mardi 12 avril 2011 Ã 18:31 -0700, Andrew Morton a Ãcrit :
> On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 09:23:11 +0800 Changli Gao <xiaosuo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 6:49 AM, Andrew Morton
> > <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > It's somewhat unclear (to me) what caused this regression.
> > >
> > > Is it because the kernel is now doing large kmalloc()s for the fdtable,
> > > and this makes the page allocator go nuts trying to satisfy high-order
> > > page allocation requests?
> > >
> > > Is it because the kernel now will usually free the fdtable
> > > synchronously within the rcu callback, rather than deferring this to a
> > > workqueue?
> > >
> > > The latter seems unlikely, so I'm thinking this was a case of
> > > high-order-allocations-considered-harmful?
> > >
> > 
> > Maybe, but I am not sure. Maybe my patch causes too many inner
> > fragments. For example, when asking for 5 pages, get 8 pages, and 3
> > pages are wasted, then memory thrash happens finally.
> 
> That theory sounds less likely, but could be tested by using
> alloc_pages_exact().
> 

Very unlikely, since fdtable sizes are powers of two, unless you hit
sysctl_nr_open and it was changed (default value being 2^20)




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