ftrace can fail to allocate per-CPU ring buffer on systems with a large
number of CPUs coupled while large amounts of cache happening in the
page cache. Currently the ring buffer allocation doesn't retry in the VM
implementation even if direct-reclaim made some progress but still
wasn't able to find a free page. On retrying I see that the allocations
almost always succeed. The retry doesn't happen because __GFP_NORETRY is
used in the tracer to prevent the case where we might OOM, however if we
drop __GFP_NORETRY, we risk destabilizing the system if OOM killer is
triggered. To prevent this situation, use the __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL flag
introduced recently [1].
Tested the following still succeeds without destabilizing a system with
1GB memory.
echo 300000 > /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/buffer_size_kb
[1] https://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=149820805124906&w=2
Cc: Tim Murray <[email protected]>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <[email protected]>
Cc: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Joel Fernandes <[email protected]>
---
changes since v1:
Added acks and dropped stable
kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c | 10 +++++-----
1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
diff --git a/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c b/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c
index 4ae268e687fe..529cc50d7243 100644
--- a/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c
+++ b/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c
@@ -1136,12 +1136,12 @@ static int __rb_allocate_pages(long nr_pages, struct list_head *pages, int cpu)
for (i = 0; i < nr_pages; i++) {
struct page *page;
/*
- * __GFP_NORETRY flag makes sure that the allocation fails
- * gracefully without invoking oom-killer and the system is
- * not destabilized.
+ * __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL flag makes sure that the allocation fails
+ * gracefully without invoking oom-killer and the system is not
+ * destabilized.
*/
bpage = kzalloc_node(ALIGN(sizeof(*bpage), cache_line_size()),
- GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NORETRY,
+ GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL,
cpu_to_node(cpu));
if (!bpage)
goto free_pages;
@@ -1149,7 +1149,7 @@ static int __rb_allocate_pages(long nr_pages, struct list_head *pages, int cpu)
list_add(&bpage->list, pages);
page = alloc_pages_node(cpu_to_node(cpu),
- GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NORETRY, 0);
+ GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL, 0);
if (!page)
goto free_pages;
bpage->page = page_address(page);
--
2.13.2.725.g09c95d1e9-goog