__GFP_REPEAT was designed to allow retry-but-eventually-fail semantic to
the page allocator. This has been true but only for allocations
requests larger than PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER. It has been always
ignored for smaller sizes. This is a bit unfortunate because there is
no way to express the same semantic for those requests and they are
considered too important to fail so they might end up looping in the
page allocator for ever, similarly to GFP_NOFAIL requests.
Now that the whole tree has been cleaned up and accidental or misled
usage of __GFP_REPEAT flag has been removed for !costly requests we can
give the original flag a better name and more importantly a more useful
semantic. Let's rename it to __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL which tells the user
that the allocator would try really hard but there is no promise of a
success. This will work independent of the order and overrides the
default allocator behavior. Page allocator users have several levels of
guarantee vs. cost options (take GFP_KERNEL as an example)
- GFP_KERNEL & ~__GFP_RECLAIM - optimistic allocation without _any_
attempt to free memory at all. The most light weight mode which even
doesn't kick the background reclaim. Should be used carefully because
it might deplete the memory and the next user might hit the more
aggressive reclaim
- GFP_KERNEL & ~__GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM (or GFP_NOWAIT)- optimistic
allocation without any attempt to free memory from the current
context but can wake kswapd to reclaim memory if the zone is below
the low watermark. Can be used from either atomic contexts or when
the request is a performance optimization and there is another
fallback for a slow path.
- (GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_HIGH) & ~__GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM (aka GFP_ATOMIC) -
non sleeping allocation with an expensive fallback so it can access
some portion of memory reserves. Usually used from interrupt/bh
context with an expensive slow path fallback.
- GFP_KERNEL - both background and direct reclaim are allowed and the
_default_ page allocator behavior is used. That means that !costly
allocation requests are basically nofail but there is no guarantee of
that behavior so failures have to be checked properly by callers
(e.g. OOM killer victim is allowed to fail currently).
- GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NORETRY - overrides the default allocator behavior
and all allocation requests fail early rather than cause disruptive
reclaim (one round of reclaim in this implementation). The OOM killer
is not invoked.
- GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL - overrides the default allocator
behavior and all allocation requests try really hard. The request
will fail if the reclaim cannot make any progress. The OOM killer
won't be triggered.
- GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NOFAIL - overrides the default allocator behavior
and all allocation requests will loop endlessly until they succeed.
This might be really dangerous especially for larger orders.
Existing users of __GFP_REPEAT are changed to __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL
because they already had their semantic. No new users are added.
__alloc_pages_slowpath is changed to bail out for __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL if
there is no progress and we have already passed the OOM point.
This means that all the reclaim opportunities have been exhausted except
the most disruptive one (the OOM killer) and a user defined fallback
behavior is more sensible than keep retrying in the page allocator.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix arch/sparc/kernel/mdesc.c]
[mhocko@suse.com: semantic fix]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170626123847.GM11534@dhcp22.suse.cz
[mhocko@kernel.org: address other thing spotted by Vlastimil]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170626124233.GN11534@dhcp22.suse.cz
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170623085345.11304-3-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Alex Belits <alex.belits@cavium.com>
Cc: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Cc: David Daney <david.daney@cavium.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.com>
Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
dcda9b0471