Re: [Patch v2 3/4] mm/page_alloc.c: pass all bad reasons to bad_page()

[Anshuman Khandual]

On 01/20/2020 03:52 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Mon 20-01-20 11:04:14, Wei Yang wrote:
>> Now we can pass all bad reasons to __dump_page().
> And we do we want to do that? The dump of the page will tell us the
> whole story so a single and the most important reason sounds like a
> better implementation. The code is also more subtle because each caller
> of the function has to be aware of how many reasons there might be.
> Not to mention that you need a room for 5 pointers on the stack and this
> and page allocator might be called from deeper call chains.
> 

Two paths which lead to __dump_page(), dump_page() and bad_page().
Callers of dump_page() can give a single reason what they consider the
most important which leads to page dumping. This makes sense but gets
trickier in bad_page() path. At present, free_pages_check_bad() and
check_new_page_bad() has a sequence of 'if' statements which decides
"most important" reason for __dump_page() without much rationale and
similar in case of free_tail_pages_check() as well. As all information
about the page for corresponding reasons are printed with __dump_page()
anyways, do free_pages_check_bad() or check_new_page_bad() really need
to provide any particular single reason ?