Re: [RFC v2 4/4] mm: fallback for offline nodes in alloc_pages_node

From: Vlastimil Babka
Date: Fri Jul 24 2015 - 16:40:11 EST


On 24.7.2015 21:54, David Rientjes wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Jul 2015, Christoph Lameter wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 24 Jul 2015, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
>>
>>> diff --git a/include/linux/gfp.h b/include/linux/gfp.h
>>> index 531c72d..104a027 100644
>>> --- a/include/linux/gfp.h
>>> +++ b/include/linux/gfp.h
>>> @@ -321,8 +321,12 @@ static inline struct page *alloc_pages_node(int nid, gfp_t gfp_mask,
>>> unsigned int order)
>>> {
>>> /* Unknown node is current (or closest) node */
>>> - if (nid == NUMA_NO_NODE)
>>> + if (nid == NUMA_NO_NODE) {
>>> nid = numa_mem_id();
>>> + } else if (!node_online(nid)) {
>>> + VM_WARN_ON(!node_online(nid));
>>> + nid = numa_mem_id();
>>> + }
>>
>> I would think you would only want this for debugging purposes. The
>> overwhelming majority of hardware out there has no memory
>> onlining/offlining capability after all and this adds the overhead to each
>> call to alloc_pages_node.
>>
>> Make this dependo n CONFIG_VM_DEBUG or some such thing?
>>
>
> Yeah, the suggestion was for VM_WARN_ON() in the conditional, but the
> placement has changed somewhat because of the new __alloc_pages_node(). I
> think
>
> else if (VM_WARN_ON(!node_online(nid)))
> nid = numa_mem_id();
>
> should be fine since it only triggers for CONFIG_DEBUG_VM.

Um, so on your original suggestion I thought that you assumed that the condition
inside VM_WARN_ON is evaluated regardless of CONFIG_DEBUG_VM, it just will or
will not generate a warning. Which is how BUG_ON works, but VM_WARN_ON (and
VM_BUG_ON) doesn't. IIUC VM_WARN_ON() with !CONFIG_DEBUG_VM will always be false.
Because I didn't think you would suggest the "nid = numa_mem_id()" for
!node_online(nid) fixup would happen only for CONFIG_DEBUG_VM kernels. But it
seems that you do suggest that? I would understand if the fixup (correcting an
offline node to some that's online) was done regardless of DEBUG_VM, and
DEBUG_VM just switched between silent and noisy fixup. But having a debug option
alter the outcome seems wrong?
Am I correct that passing an offline node is not fatal, just the zonelist will
be empty and the allocation will fail? Now without DEBUG_VM it would silently
fail, and with DEBUG_VM it would warn, but succeed on another node.

So either we do fixup regardless of DEBUG_VM, or drop this patch, as the
VM_WARN_ON(!node_online(nid)) is already done in __alloc_pages_node() thanks to
patch 2/4?
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/