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From:   "NeilBrown" <neilb@suse.de>
To:     "Michal Hocko" <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc:     "Uladzislau Rezki" <urezki@gmail.com>,
        "Linux Memory Management List" <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        "Dave Chinner" <david@fromorbit.com>,
        "Andrew Morton" <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        "Christoph Hellwig" <hch@infradead.org>,
        linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
        "LKML" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "Ilya Dryomov" <idryomov@gmail.com>,
        "Jeff Layton" <jlayton@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC 2/3] mm/vmalloc: add support for __GFP_NOFAIL
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Date:   Tue, 26 Oct 2021 21:24:41 +1100
Message-id: <163524388152.8576.15706993879941541847@noble.neil.brown.name>
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On Tue, 26 Oct 2021, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Tue 26-10-21 10:50:21, Neil Brown wrote:
> > On Mon, 25 Oct 2021, Uladzislau Rezki wrote:
> > > On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 09:49:08AM +1100, NeilBrown wrote:
> > > > However I'm not 100% certain, and the behaviour might change in the
> > > > future.  So having one place (the definition of memalloc_retry_wait())
> > > > where we can change the sleeping behaviour if the alloc_page behavour
> > > > changes, would be ideal.  Maybe memalloc_retry_wait() could take a
> > > > gfpflags arg.
> > > > 
> > > At sleeping is required for __get_vm_area_node() because in case of lack
> > > of vmap space it will end up in tight loop without sleeping what is
> > > really bad.
> > > 
> > So vmalloc() has two failure modes.  alloc_page() failure and
> > __alloc_vmap_area() failure.  The caller cannot tell which...
> > 
> > Actually, they can.  If we pass __GFP_NOFAIL to vmalloc(), and it fails,
> > then it must have been __alloc_vmap_area() which failed.
> > What do we do in that case?
> > Can we add a waitq which gets a wakeup when __purge_vmap_area_lazy()
> > finishes?
> > If we use the spinlock from that waitq in place of free_vmap_area_lock,
> > then the wakeup would be nearly free if no-one was waiting, and worth
> > while if someone was waiting.
> 
> Is this really required to be part of the initial support?

No.... I was just thinking out-loud.

NeilBrown