Re: [PATCH mmotm v1] mm/hwpoison: disable pcp for page_handle_poison()

[Mel Gorman]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 06:26:26PM +0900, Naoya Horiguchi wrote:
> From: Naoya Horiguchi <naoya.horiguchi@xxxxxxx>
> 
> Recent changes by patch "mm/page_alloc: allow high-order pages to be
> stored on the per-cpu lists" makes kernels determine whether to use pcp
> by pcp_allowed_order(), which breaks soft-offline for hugetlb pages.
> 
> Soft-offline dissolves a migration source page, then removes it from
> buddy free list, so it's assumed that any subpage of the soft-offlined
> hugepage are recognized as a buddy page just after returning from
> dissolve_free_huge_page().  pcp_allowed_order() returns true for
> hugetlb, so this assumption is no longer true.
> 
> So disable pcp during dissolve_free_huge_page() and
> take_page_off_buddy() to prevent soft-offlined hugepages from linking to
> pcp lists.  Soft-offline should not be common events so the impact on
> performance should be minimal.  And I think that the optimization of
> Mel's patch could benefit to hugetlb so zone_pcp_disable() is called
> only in hwpoison context.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Naoya Horiguchi <naoya.horiguchi@xxxxxxx>

I think this is ok, it'll remove a page that is to be poisoned from the
PCP lists and put them back in the page allocator. It's a heavy but rare
operation and identifying what PCP list a free page is on would be
tricky so

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

The alternative I guess would be specical casing update_and_free_page to
bypass the PCP but it'd be clumsy from an API point of view and I don't
think it's worth the effort.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs