Re: [5.6.0-rc2-next-20200218/powerpc] Boot failure on POWER9
From: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Date: 2020-02-26 20:32:00
Also in:
linux-next
On Wed, 26 Feb 2020, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Wed 26-02-20 18:44:13, Cristopher Lameter wrote:quoted
On Wed, 26 Feb 2020, Michal Hocko wrote:quoted
Besides that kmalloc_node shouldn't really have an implicit GFP_THISNODE semantic right? At least I do not see anything like that documented anywhere.Kmalloc_node does not support memory policies etc. Only kmalloc does. kmalloc_node is mostly used by subsystems that have determined the active nodes and want a targeted allocation on those nodes.I am sorry but I have hard time to follow your responses here. They open more questions than they answer for me. The primary point here is that kmalloc_node on a memory less node blows up and panics the kernel. I strongly believe this is a bug. We cannot really make all callers of kmalloc_node and co. to be hotplug aware. Another question is the semantic of kmalloc_node when the node cannot satisfy the request. I have always thought that the allocation would simply fall back to any other node unless __GFP_THISNODE is explicitly specified.
Am I right in classifying this as a trade-off between an unlikely(!node_state(nid, N_MEMORY)) directly in kmalloc_node() vs fixing up a caller passing a memoryless nid? Seems like we wouldn't want to penalize kmalloc_node() for making such a check for 99.99% of allocators that don't need it and would rather do a node_to_mem_node(nid) or numa_mem_id() in the caller?