Re: [PATCH] mm: be more verbose for alloc_contig_range faliures

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Thu Feb 18 2021 - 13:45:07 EST


On 18.02.21 17:19, Minchan Kim wrote:
On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 10:43:21AM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
On 18.02.21 10:35, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Thu 18-02-21 10:02:43, David Hildenbrand wrote:
On 18.02.21 09:56, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Wed 17-02-21 08:36:03, Minchan Kim wrote:
alloc_contig_range is usually used on cma area or movable zone.
It's critical if the page migration fails on those areas so
dump more debugging message like memory_hotplug unless user
specifiy __GFP_NOWARN.

I agree with David that this has a potential to generate a lot of output
and it is not really clear whether it is worth it. Page isolation code
already has REPORT_FAILURE mode which currently used only for the memory
hotplug because this was just too noisy from the CMA path - d381c54760dc
("mm: only report isolation failures when offlining memory").

Maybe migration failures are less likely to fail but still.

Side note: I really dislike that uncontrolled error reporting on memory
offlining path we have enabled as default. Yeah, it might be useful for
ZONE_MOVABLE in some cases, but otherwise it's just noise.

Just do a "sudo stress-ng --memhotplug 1" and see the log getting flooded

Anyway we can discuss this in a separate thread but I think this is not
a representative workload.

Sure, but the essence is "this is noise", and we'll have more noise on
alloc_contig_range() as we see these calls more frequently. There should be
an explicit way to enable such *debug* messages.

alloc_contig_range already has gfp_mask and it respects __GFP_NOWARN.

I am not 100% sure it does.

Why shouldn't people use it if they don't care the failure?

Because flooding the log with noise maybe a handful of people on this planet care about is absolutely useless. With the warnings in warn_alloc() people can at least conclude something reasonable.

Semantically, it makes sense to me.

About the messeage flooding, shouldn't we go with ratelimiting?

At least that (see warn_alloc()). But I'd even want to see some other trigger to enable this explicitly on demand.

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb