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Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] ipc: use kmalloc for msg_queue and shmid_kernel
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc:     cgroups@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
        Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Dmitry Safonov <0x7f454c46@gmail.com>
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 <YIaVKi+0VMrz5LGD@dhcp22.suse.cz>
From:   Vasily Averin <vvs@virtuozzo.com>
Message-ID: <70805e05-5e56-2ab9-2654-3d48e9fe5a0a@virtuozzo.com>
Date:   Wed, 28 Apr 2021 08:15:10 +0300
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On 4/26/21 1:25 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> Using kvmalloc for sub page size objects is suboptimal because kmalloc
> can easily fallback into vmalloc under memory pressure and smaller
> objects would fragment memory. Therefore replace kvmalloc by a simple
> kmalloc.

I think you're wrong here:
kvmalloc can failback to vmalloc for size > PAGE_SIZE only

Please take look at mm/util.c::kvmalloc_node()

        if (size > PAGE_SIZE) {
                kmalloc_flags |= __GFP_NOWARN;

                if (!(kmalloc_flags & __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL))
                        kmalloc_flags |= __GFP_NORETRY;
        }

        ret = kmalloc_node(size, kmalloc_flags, node);

        /*
         * It doesn't really make sense to fallback to vmalloc for sub page
         * requests
         */
        if (ret || size <= PAGE_SIZE)
                return ret;

        return __vmalloc_node(size, 1, flags, node,
                        __builtin_return_address(0));

For small objects kvmalloc is not much different just from kmalloc,
so the patch is mostly cosmetic.