On Fri 17-05-19 15:18:19, Alexander Potapenko wrote:

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 2:59 PM Michal this flag Hocko
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

[It would be great to keep people involved in the previous version in the
CC list]

Yes, I've been trying to keep everyone in the loop, but your email
fell through the cracks.
Sorry about that.

No problem

quoted

On Tue 14-05-19 16:35:36, Alexander Potapenko wrote:

quoted

When passed to an allocator (either pagealloc or SL[AOU]B),
__GFP_NO_AUTOINIT tells it to not initialize the requested memory if the
init_on_alloc boot option is enabled. This can be useful in the cases
newly allocated memory is going to be initialized by the caller right
away.

__GFP_NO_AUTOINIT doesn't affect init_on_free behavior, except for SLOB,
where init_on_free implies init_on_alloc.

__GFP_NO_AUTOINIT basically defeats the hardening against information
leaks provided by init_on_alloc, so one should use it with caution.

This patch also adds __GFP_NO_AUTOINIT to alloc_pages() calls in SL[AOU]B.
Doing so is safe, because the heap allocators initialize the pages they
receive before passing memory to the callers.

I still do not like the idea of a new gfp flag as explained in the
previous email. People will simply use it incorectly or arbitrarily.
We have that juicy experience from the past.

Just to preserve some context, here's the previous email:
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10907595/
(plus the patch removing GFP_TEMPORARY for the curious ones:
https://lwn.net/Articles/729145/)

Not only. GFP_REPEAT being another one and probably others I cannot
remember from the top of my head.

quoted

Freeing a memory is an opt-in feature and the slab allocator can already
tell many (with constructor or GFP_ZERO) do not need it.

Sorry, I didn't understand this piece. Could you please elaborate?

The allocator can assume that caches with a constructor will initialize
the object so additional zeroying is not needed. GFP_ZERO should be self
explanatory.

quoted

So can we go without this gfp thing and see whether somebody actually
finds a performance problem with the feature enabled and think about
what can we do about it rather than add this maint. nightmare from the
very beginning?

There were two reasons to introduce this flag initially.
The first was double initialization of pages allocated for SLUB.

Could you elaborate please?

However the benchmark results provided in this and the previous patch
don't show any noticeable difference - most certainly because the cost
of initializing the page is amortized.

The second one was to fine-tune hackbench, for which the slowdown
drops by a factor of 2.
But optimizing a mitigation for certain benchmarks is a questionable
measure, so maybe we could really go without it.

Agreed. Over optimization based on an artificial workloads tend to be
dubious IMHO.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs