Re: [patch v2 for-4.0] mm, thp: really limit transparent hugepage allocation to local node

[David Rientjes]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2015, Vlastimil Babka wrote:

> > Commit 077fcf116c8c ("mm/thp: allocate transparent hugepages on local
> > node") restructured alloc_hugepage_vma() with the intent of only
> > allocating transparent hugepages locally when there was not an effective
> > interleave mempolicy.
> > 
> > alloc_pages_exact_node() does not limit the allocation to the single
> > node, however, but rather prefers it.  This is because __GFP_THISNODE is
> > not set which would cause the node-local nodemask to be passed.  Without
> > it, only a nodemask that prefers the local node is passed.
> 
> Oops, good catch.
> But I believe we have the same problem with khugepaged_alloc_page(), rendering
> the recent node determination and zone_reclaim strictness patches partially
> useless.
> 

Indeed.

> Then I start to wonder about other alloc_pages_exact_node() users. Some do
> pass __GFP_THISNODE, others not - are they also mistaken? I guess the function
> is a misnomer - when I see "exact_node", I expect the __GFP_THISNODE behavior.
> 

I looked through these yesterday as well and could only find the 
do_migrate_pages() case for page migration where __GFP_THISNODE was 
missing.  I proposed that separately as 
http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=142481989722497 -- I couldn't find any 
other users that looked wrong.

 > I think to avoid such hidden catches, we should create
> alloc_pages_preferred_node() variant, change the exact_node() variant to pass
> __GFP_THISNODE, and audit and adjust all callers accordingly.
> 

Sounds like that should be done as part of a cleanup after the 4.0 issues 
are addressed.  alloc_pages_exact_node() does seem to suggest that we want 
exactly that node, implying __GFP_THISNODE behavior already, so it would 
be good to avoid having this come up again in the future.

> Also, you pass __GFP_NOWARN but that should be covered by GFP_TRANSHUGE
> already. Of course, nothing guarantees that hugepage == true implies that gfp
> == GFP_TRANSHUGE... but current in-tree callers conform to that.
> 

Ah, good point, and it includes __GFP_NORETRY as well which means that 
this patch is busted.  It won't try compaction or direct reclaim in the 
page allocator slowpath because of this:

	/*
	 * GFP_THISNODE (meaning __GFP_THISNODE, __GFP_NORETRY and
	 * __GFP_NOWARN set) should not cause reclaim since the subsystem
	 * (f.e. slab) using GFP_THISNODE may choose to trigger reclaim
	 * using a larger set of nodes after it has established that the
	 * allowed per node queues are empty and that nodes are
	 * over allocated.
	 */
	if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_NUMA) &&
	    (gfp_mask & GFP_THISNODE) == GFP_THISNODE)
		goto nopage;

Hmm.  It would be disappointing to have to pass the nodemask of the exact 
node that we want to allocate from into the page allocator to avoid using 
__GFP_THISNODE.

There's a sneaky way around it by just removing __GFP_NORETRY from 
GFP_TRANSHUGE so the condition above fails and since the page allocator 
won't retry for such a high-order allocation, but that probably just 
papers over this stuff too much already.  I think what we want to do is 
cause the slab allocators to not use __GFP_WAIT if they want to avoid 
reclaim.

This is probably going to be a much more invasive patch than originally 
thought.
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