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Date:   Thu, 24 Sep 2020 08:38:34 -0700
From:   "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>
To:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc:     Uladzislau Rezki <urezki@gmail.com>,
        Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, RCU <rcu@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-mm@kvack.org, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        "Theodore Y . Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>,
        Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>,
        Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>,
        Oleksiy Avramchenko <oleksiy.avramchenko@sonymobile.com>,
        Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Subject: Re: [RFC-PATCH 2/4] mm: Add __rcu_alloc_page_lockless() func.
Message-ID: <20200924153834.GW29330@paulmck-ThinkPad-P72>
Reply-To: paulmck@kernel.org
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On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 01:19:07PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 10:16:14AM +0200, Uladzislau Rezki wrote:
> > The key point is "enough". We need pages to make a) fast progress b) support
> > single argument of kvfree_rcu(one_arg). Not vice versa. That "enough" depends
> > on scheduler latency and vague pre-allocated number of pages, it might
> > be not enough what would require to refill it more and more or we can overshoot
> > that would lead to memory overhead. So we have here timing issues and
> > not accurate model. IMHO.
> 
> I'm firmly opposed to the single argument kvfree_rcu() idea, that's
> requiring memory to free memory.

Not quite.

First, there is a fallback when memory allocation fails.  Second,
in heavy-use situations, there is only one allocation per about
500 kvfree_rcu() calls on 64-bit systems.  Third, there are other
long-standing situations that require allocating memory in order to
free memory.

So I agree that it is a good general rule of thumb to avoid allocating
on free paths, but there are exceptions.  This is one of them.

						Thanx, Paul