Re: [PATCH] Improve Atheros ethernet driver not to do order 4 GFP_ATOMIC allocation

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Thu Dec 03 2015 - 02:49:13 EST


On Wed 2015-12-02 22:43:31, Chris Snook wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 12:35 PM David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2015 14:21:29 +0100
> >
> > > On Sat 28-11-15 15:51:13, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > >>
> > >> atl1c driver is doing order-4 allocation with GFP_ATOMIC
> > >> priority. That often breaks networking after resume. Switch to
> > >> GFP_KERNEL. Still not ideal, but should be significantly better.
> > >
> > > It is not clear why GFP_KERNEL can replace GFP_ATOMIC safely neither
> > > from the changelog nor from the patch context.
> >
> > Earlier in the function we do a GFP_KERNEL kmalloc so:
> >
> > Â\_(ã)_/Â
> >
> > It should be fine.
> >
>
> AFAICT, the people who benefit from GFP_ATOMIC are the people running all
> their storage over NFS/iSCSI who are suspending their machines while
> they're so busy they don't have any clean order 4 pagecache to drop, and
> want the machine to panic rather than hang. The people who benefit
>from

iSCSI on machine that suspends... is that a joke or complicated way of
saying that noone benefits? And code uses... both GFP_ATOMIC and
GFP_KERNEL so that both sides are equally unhappy? :-).

Do you want to test the patch, update the subject line and send it to
Davem, or should I do it?

Do you see a way to split the allocation? Not even order 4 GFP_KERNEL
allocation is a nice thing to do...

Pavel
--
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