[PATCH] mm: rate-limit allocation failure warnings more aggressively

From: Johannes Weiner
Date: Mon Oct 28 2019 - 15:49:13 EST


While investigating a bug related to higher atomic allocation
failures, we noticed the failure warnings positively drowning the
console, and in our case trigger lockup warnings because of a serial
console too slow to handle all that output.

But even if we had a faster console, it's unclear what additional
information the current level of repetition provides.

Allocation failures happen for three reasons: The machine is OOM, the
VM is failing to handle reasonable requests, or somebody is making
unreasonable requests (and didn't acknowledge their opportunism with
__GFP_NOWARN). Having the memory dump, a callstack, and the ratelimit
stats on skipped failure warnings should provide enough information to
let users/admins/developers know whether something is wrong and point
them in the right direction for debugging, bpftracing etc.

Limit allocation failure warnings to 1 spew every ten seconds.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/page_alloc.c | 7 +------
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 791c018314b3..f412b17b5d59 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -3720,10 +3720,6 @@ get_page_from_freelist(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order, int alloc_flags,
static void warn_alloc_show_mem(gfp_t gfp_mask, nodemask_t *nodemask)
{
unsigned int filter = SHOW_MEM_FILTER_NODES;
- static DEFINE_RATELIMIT_STATE(show_mem_rs, HZ, 1);
-
- if (!__ratelimit(&show_mem_rs))
- return;

/*
* This documents exceptions given to allocations in certain
@@ -3744,8 +3740,7 @@ void warn_alloc(gfp_t gfp_mask, nodemask_t *nodemask, const char *fmt, ...)
{
struct va_format vaf;
va_list args;
- static DEFINE_RATELIMIT_STATE(nopage_rs, DEFAULT_RATELIMIT_INTERVAL,
- DEFAULT_RATELIMIT_BURST);
+ static DEFINE_RATELIMIT_STATE(nopage_rs, 10*HZ, 1);

if ((gfp_mask & __GFP_NOWARN) || !__ratelimit(&nopage_rs))
return;
--
2.23.0