On Mon Jun 15, 2026 at 2:38 PM UTC, Vlastimil Babka (SUSE) wrote:

On 6/12/26 17:29, Gregory Price wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jun 10, 2026 at 04:12:52PM -0400, Gregory Price wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jun 10, 2026 at 08:59:59PM +0200, David Hildenbrand (Arm) wrote:

quoted

quoted

I understand this question in two ways:

  1) Can we disallow PAGE allocation and limit this to FOLIO allocation

Yes. Can we only allow folios to be allocated from private memory nodes. So let
me reply to that one below.

... snip ...

quoted

At LSF/MM we talked about how GFP flags are bad and how deriving stuff from the
context might be better. I think there was also talk about how the memalloc_*
interface might be a better way forward. Maybe we would start giving the
allocator more context ("we are allocating a folio").

The following is incomplete (esp. hugetlb stuff I assume), just as some idea:

I will still probably send the next RFC version tomorrow or friday,
as I want to get some eyes on the __GFP_PRIVATE-less pattern.

Also, I made a new `anondax` driver which enables userland testing
of this functionality without any specialty hardware.

(apologies for the length of this email: this will all be covered in
the coming cover letter, but I just wanted to share a bit of a preview)

===

Just another small update - I am planning to post the RFC today once i
get some mild cleanup done.  It will be based on the dax atomic hotplug

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20260605211911.2160954-1-gourry@gourry.net/ (local)

But a couple specific details regarding the memalloc pieces that i've
learned the past couple of days playing with it.

1) memalloc_folio is required to ensure non-folio allocations don't land
   on the private node, even if it happens within a memalloc_private
   context.  Since memalloc_folio may be useful in contexts outside of
   private nodes, I kept this as a separate flag.

   If we think there will *never* be additional users of memalloc_folio,
   then we could fold _folio into _private to save the flag for now and
   add it back when we actually need it.

2) memalloc_private is needed to unlock private nodes, but in the
   original NOFALLBACK-only design, you also needed __GFP_THISNODE.

   This is *highly* restrictive.  I found when playing with mbind that
   MPOL_BIND + __GFP_THISNODE generates a WARN (valid WARN, it normally
   implies a bug). 

   That leads me to #3

I think the memalloc approach is dangerous due to unexpected nesting. There
might be nested page allocations in page allocation itself (due to some
debugging option). But also interrupts do not change what "current" points
to. Suddenly those could start requesting folios and/or private nodes and be
surprised, I'm afraid.

Minor side-note: couldn't we just define it such that the allocator
ignores the context when not in_task() (and warn if you try to enter the
context while not currently in_task())?

(Don't think this would change the conclusion very much, e.g. doesn't
help with the nesting issues. Mostly curious in case I'm missing a
detail here).

The memalloc scopes only work well when they restrict the context wrt
reclaim, and allocations in IRQ have to be already restricted heavily
(atomic) so further memalloc restrictions don't do anything in practice. But
to make them change other aspects of the allocations like this won't work.