[PATCH 0/19] get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPORT

From	Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Newsgroups	linux.kernel
Subject	[PATCH 0/19] get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPORT
Date	2016-04-11 13:10 +0200
Message-ID	<rmHTb-4Qu-3@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
Organization	linux.* mail to news gateway

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Hi,
this is the second version of the patchset previously sent [1]

while working on something unrelated I've checked the current usage
of __GFP_REPEAT in the tree. It seems that a majority of the usage is
and always has been bogus because __GFP_REPEAT has always been about
costly high order allocations while we are using it for order-0 or very
small orders very often. It seems that a big pile of them is just a
copy&paste when a code has been adopted from one arch to another.

I think it makes some sense to get rid of them because they are just
making the semantic more unclear. Please note that GFP_REPEAT is
documented as
 * __GFP_REPEAT: Try hard to allocate the memory, but the allocation attempt
 *   _might_ fail.  This depends upon the particular VM implementation.
while !costly requests have basically nofail semantic. So one could
reasonably expect that order-0 request with __GFP_REPEAT will not loop
for ever. This is not implemented right now though.

I would like to move on with __GFP_REPEAT and define a better
semantic for it. One thought was to rename it to __GFP_BEST_EFFORT
which would behave consistently for all orders and guarantee that the
allocation would try as long as it seem feasible or fail eventually.
!costly request would then finally get a request context which neiter
fails too early (GFP_NORETRY) nor endlessly loops in the allocator for
ever (default behavior). Costly high order requests would keep the
current semantic.

$ git grep __GFP_REPEAT next/master | wc -l
111
$ git grep __GFP_REPEAT | wc -l
35

So we are down to the third after this patch series. The remaining places
really seem to be relying on __GFP_REPEAT due to large allocation requests.
This still needs some double checking which I will do later after all the
simple ones are sorted out.

I am touching a lot of arch specific code here and I hope I got it right
but as a matter of fact I even didn't compile test for some archs as I
do not have cross compiler for them. Patches should be quite trivial to
review for stupid compile mistakes though. The tricky parts are usually
hidden by macro definitions and thats where I would appreciate help from
arch maintainers.

I am also interested whether this makes sense in general.

[1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1446740160-29094-1-git-send-email-mhocko@kernel.org

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[PATCH 0/19] get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPORT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:10 +0200
  [PATCH 15/19] tile: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:10 +0200
  [PATCH 18/19] crypto: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:10 +0200
    Re: [PATCH 18/19] crypto: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> - 2016-04-14 08:30 +0200
      Re: [PATCH 18/19] crypto: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-14 09:10 +0200
        Re: [PATCH 18/19] crypto: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> - 2016-04-14 10:20 +0200
    [PATCH resend] crypto: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-14 11:00 +0200
      Re: [PATCH resend] crypto: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> - 2016-04-15 16:40 +0200
  [PATCH 09/19] parisc: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:10 +0200
  [PATCH 16/19] unicore32: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:10 +0200
  [PATCH 08/19] nios2: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
  [PATCH 01/19] tree wide: get rid of __GFP_REPEAT for order-0 allocations part I Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
    Re: [PATCH 01/19] tree wide: get rid of __GFP_REPEAT for order-0  allocations part I David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> - 2016-04-14 22:00 +0200
      Re: [PATCH 01/19] tree wide: get rid of __GFP_REPEAT for order-0  allocations part I Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-15 09:50 +0200
  [PATCH 06/19] arc: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
    Re: [PATCH 06/19] arc: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Vineet Gupta <Vineet.Gupta1@synopsys.com> - 2016-04-11 16:30 +0200
  [PATCH 11/19] powerpc: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
  [PATCH 10/19] score: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
  [PATCH 07/19] mips: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
  [PATCH 19/19] jbd2: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
  [PATCH 13/19] s390: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
    Re: [PATCH 13/19] s390: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Cornelia Huck <cornelia.huck@de.ibm.com> - 2016-04-11 13:30 +0200
      Re: [PATCH 13/19] s390: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com> - 2016-04-11 14:50 +0200
  [PATCH 12/19] sparc: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
  [PATCH 04/19] arm: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
  [PATCH 03/19] x86/efi: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
    Re: [PATCH 03/19] x86/efi: get rid of superfluous __GFP_REPEAT Matt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk> - 2016-04-12 18:00 +0200
  [PATCH 17/19] dm: get rid of superfluous gfp flags Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-11 13:20 +0200
    Re: [PATCH 17/19] dm: get rid of superfluous gfp flags Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com> - 2016-04-15 14:30 +0200
      Re: [PATCH 17/19] dm: get rid of superfluous gfp flags Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-15 15:10 +0200
  CC in git cover letter vs patches (was Re: [PATCH 0/19] get rid of  superfluous __GFP_REPORT) Vineet Gupta <Vineet.Gupta1@synopsys.com> - 2016-04-13 13:30 +0200
    Re: CC in git cover letter vs patches (was Re: [PATCH 0/19] get rid  of superfluous __GFP_REPORT) Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2016-04-13 15:40 +0200

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