Re: [PATCH 4/7] mm: defer vmalloc from atomic context

From: Andrey Ryabinin
Date: Tue Nov 08 2016 - 12:36:53 EST




On 11/07/2016 06:09 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 06:01:45PM +0300, Andrey Ryabinin wrote:
>>> So because in_atomic doesn't work for !CONFIG_PREEMPT kernels, can we
>>> always defer the work in these cases?
>>>
>>> So for non-preemptible kernels, we always defer:
>>>
>>> if (!IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_PREEMPT) || in_atomic()) {
>>> // defer
>>> }
>>>
>>> Is this fine? Or any other ideas?
>>>
>>
>> What's wrong with my idea?
>> We can add vfree_in_atomic() and use it to free vmapped stacks
>> and for any other places where vfree() used 'in_atomict() && !in_interrupt()' context.
>
> I somehow missed the mail, sorry. That beeing said always defer is
> going to suck badly in terms of performance, so I'm not sure it's an all
> that good idea.
>
> vfree_in_atomic sounds good, but I wonder if we'll need to annotate
> more callers than just the stacks. I'm fairly bust this week, do you
> want to give that a spin? Otherwise I'll give it a try towards the
> end of this week or next week.
>

Yeah, it appears that we need more annotations. I've found another case in free_ldt_struct(),
and I bet it won't be the last.
I'll send patches.