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SubjectRe: [PATCH v5 00/21] Free some vmemmap pages of hugetlb page
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On 20.11.20 10:39, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Fri 20-11-20 10:27:05, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> On 20.11.20 09:42, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>> On Fri 20-11-20 14:43:04, Muchun Song wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> Thanks for improving the cover letter and providing some numbers. I have
>>> only glanced through the patchset because I didn't really have more time
>>> to dive depply into them.
>>>
>>> Overall it looks promissing. To summarize. I would prefer to not have
>>> the feature enablement controlled by compile time option and the kernel
>>> command line option should be opt-in. I also do not like that freeing
>>> the pool can trigger the oom killer or even shut the system down if no
>>> oom victim is eligible.
>>>
>>> One thing that I didn't really get to think hard about is what is the
>>> effect of vmemmap manipulation wrt pfn walkers. pfn_to_page can be
>>> invalid when racing with the split. How do we enforce that this won't
>>> blow up?
>>
>> I have the same concerns - the sections are online the whole time and
>> anybody with pfn_to_online_page() can grab them
>>
>> I think we have similar issues with memory offlining when removing the
>> vmemmap, it's just very hard to trigger and we can easily protect by
>> grabbing the memhotplug lock.
>
> I am not sure we can/want to span memory hotplug locking out to all pfn
> walkers. But you are right that the underlying problem is similar but
> much harder to trigger because vmemmaps are only removed when the
> physical memory is hotremoved and that happens very seldom. Maybe it
> will happen more with virtualization usecases. But this work makes it
> even more tricky. If a pfn walker races with a hotremove then it would
> just blow up when accessing the unmapped physical address space. For
> this feature a pfn walker would just grab a real struct page re-used for
> some unpredictable use under its feet. Any failure would be silent and
> hard to debug.

Right, we don't want the memory hotplug locking, thus discussions
regarding rcu. Luckily, for now I never saw a BUG report regarding this
- maybe because the time between memory offlining (offline_pages()) and
memory/vmemmap getting removed (try_remove_memory()) is just too long.
Someone would have to sleep after pfn_to_online_page() for quite a while
to trigger it.

>
> [...]
>> To keep things easy, maybe simply never allow to free these hugetlb pages
>> again for now? If they were reserved during boot and the vmemmap condensed,
>> then just let them stick around for all eternity.
>
> Not sure I understand. Do you propose to only free those vmemmap pages
> when the pool is initialized during boot time and never allow to free
> them up? That would certainly make it safer and maybe even simpler wrt
> implementation.

Exactly, let's keep it simple for now. I guess most use cases of this
(virtualization, databases, ...) will allocate hugepages during boot and
never free them.

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb

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