Add kmalloc failover to vmalloc
This patch is based on the kvmalloc helpers introduced in kernel 4.12.
It will gracefully failover memory allocations of more than one page to
vmalloc for systems under high memory pressure or fragmentation.
See Linux kernel commit:
commit
a7c3e901a46ff54c016d040847eda598a9e3e653
Author: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Date: Mon May 8 15:57:09 2017 -0700
mm: introduce kv[mz]alloc helpers
Patch series "kvmalloc", v5.
There are many open coded kmalloc with vmalloc fallback instances in the
tree. Most of them are not careful enough or simply do not care about
the underlying semantic of the kmalloc/page allocator which means that
a) some vmalloc fallbacks are basically unreachable because the kmalloc
part will keep retrying until it succeeds b) the page allocator can
invoke a really disruptive steps like the OOM killer to move forward
which doesn't sound appropriate when we consider that the vmalloc
fallback is available.
As it can be seen implementing kvmalloc requires quite an intimate
knowledge if the page allocator and the memory reclaim internals which
strongly suggests that a helper should be implemented in the memory
subsystem proper.
Most callers, I could find, have been converted to use the helper
instead. This is patch 6. There are some more relying on __GFP_REPEAT
in the networking stack which I have converted as well and Eric Dumazet
was not opposed [2] to convert them as well.
[1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/
20170130094940.13546-1-mhocko@kernel.org
[2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/
1485273626.16328.301.camel@edumazet-glaptop3.roam.corp.google.com
This patch (of 9):
Using kmalloc with the vmalloc fallback for larger allocations is a
common pattern in the kernel code. Yet we do not have any common helper
for that and so users have invented their own helpers. Some of them are
really creative when doing so. Let's just add kv[mz]alloc and make sure
it is implemented properly. This implementation makes sure to not make
a large memory pressure for > PAGE_SZE requests (__GFP_NORETRY) and also
to not warn about allocation failures. This also rules out the OOM
killer as the vmalloc is a more approapriate fallback than a disruptive
user visible action.
Signed-off-by: Michael Jeanson <mjeanson@efficios.com>
Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>