[Devel] Re: [PATCH v2 18/29] memcg: kmem controller charge/uncharge infrastructure

[Glauber Costa]

On 05/16/2012 12:18 PM, KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki wrote:
>> If at this point the memcg hits a NOFAIL allocation worth 2 pages, by
>> >  the method I am using, the memcg will be at 4M + 4k after the
>> >  allocation. Charging it to the root memcg will leave it at 4M - 4k.
>> >  
>> >  This means that to be able to allocate a page again, you need to free
>> >  two other pages, be it the 2 pages used by the GFP allocation or any
>> >  other. In other words: the memcg that originated the charge is held
>> >  accountable for it. If he says it can't fail for whatever reason, fine,
>> >  we respect that,  but we punish it later for other allocations.
>> >  
> I personally think 'we punish it later' is bad thing at resource accounting.
> We have 'hard limit'. It's not soft limit.

That only makes sense if you will fail the allocation. If you won't, you
are over your hard limit anyway. You are just masquerading that.

>> >  Without that GFP_NOFAIL becomes just a nice way for people to bypass
>> >  those controls altogether, since after a ton of GFP_NOFAIL allocations,
>> >  normal allocations will still succeed.
>> >  
> Allowing people to bypass is not bad because they're kernel.

No, they are not. They are in process context, on behalf of a process
that belongs to a valid memcg. If they happen to be a kernel thread,
!current->mm test will send the allocation to the root memcg already.

> 
> But, IIUC, from gfp.h
> ==
>   * __GFP_NOFAIL: The VM implementation_must_  retry infinitely: the caller
>   * cannot handle allocation failures.  This modifier is deprecated and no new
>   * users should be added.
> ==
> 
> GFP_NOFAIL will go away and no new user is recommended.
> 
Yes, I am aware of that. That's actually why I don't plan to insist on
this too much - although your e-mail didn't really convince me.

It should not matter in practice.

> So, please skip GFP_NOFAIL accounting and avoid to write
> "usage may go over limit if you're unfortune, sorry" into memcg documentation.

I won't write that, because that's not true. Is more like: "Allocations
that can fail will fail if you go over limit".

> 
>> >  The change you propose is totally doable. I just don't believe it should
>> >  be done.
>> >  
>> >  But let me know where you stand.
>> >  
> My stand point is keeping "usage<= limit" is the spec. and
> important in enterprise system. So, please avoid usage>  limit.
> 
As I said, I won't make a case here because those allocations shouldn't
matter in real life anyway. I can change it.