Commit ee040cbd authored by Baokun Li's avatar Baokun Li Committed by Andrew Morton
Browse files

mm/page_alloc: don't warn about large allocations with __GFP_NOFAIL

Filesystems use __GFP_NOFAIL to allocate block-sized folios for metadata
reads at critical points, since they cannot afford to go read-only, shut
down, or enter an inconsistent state due to memory pressure.

Currently, attempting to allocate page units greater than order-1 with the
__GFP_NOFAIL flag triggers a WARN_ON() in __alloc_pages_slowpath(). 
However, filesystems supporting large block sizes (blocksize > PAGE_SIZE)
can easily require allocations larger than order-1.

As Matthew Wilcox noted in [1], if we have a filesystem with 64KiB
sectors, there will be many clean folios in the page cache that are 64KiB
or larger.  He also explained in [2] why kvmalloc isn't a valid approach
here.

With gfp flags and order already included in the OOM report, both
Vlastimil Babka and Michal Hocko suggested that we can take the risk of
removing this warning first and then observe whether a large number of
related OOM reports appear.

If that happens, we can consider adding special handling in other places.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20251105085652.4081123-1-libaokun@huaweicloud.com


Signed-off-by: default avatarBaokun Li <libaokun1@huawei.com>
Suggested-by: default avatarMatthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/aQPX1-XWQjKaMTZB@casper.infradead.org [1]
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/aQTHMI3t5mNXp0M1@casper.infradead.org

 [2]
Suggested-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/188a95ba-6384-4319-bb74-c0d9ec6c4079@suse.cz


Suggested-by: default avatarMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/aQotQBjnDDeL_wHx@tiehlicka


Acked-by: default avatarMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Brendan Jackman <jackmanb@google.com>
Cc: ErKun Yang <yangerkun@huawei.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev>
Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>
Cc: "zhangyi (F)" <yi.zhang@huawei.com>
Cc: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
parent 77a7cfd9
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Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -4683,11 +4683,6 @@ __alloc_pages_slowpath(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
	int reserve_flags;

	if (unlikely(nofail)) {
		/*
		 * We most definitely don't want callers attempting to
		 * allocate greater than order-1 page units with __GFP_NOFAIL.
		 */
		WARN_ON_ONCE(order > 1);
		/*
		 * Also we don't support __GFP_NOFAIL without __GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM,
		 * otherwise, we may result in lockup.