On Thursday July 24, a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl wrote:

Generic reserve management code. 

It provides methods to reserve and charge. Upon this, generic alloc/free style
reserve pools could be build, which could fully replace mempool_t
functionality.

This looks quite different to last time I looked at the code (I
think).

You now have a more structured "kmalloc_reserve" interface which
returns a flag to say if the allocation was from an emergency pool.  I
think this will be a distinct improvement at the call sites, though I
haven't looked at them yet. :-)

+
+struct mem_reserve {
+	struct mem_reserve *parent;
+	struct list_head children;
+	struct list_head siblings;
+
+	const char *name;
+
+	long pages;
+	long limit;
+	long usage;
+	spinlock_t lock;	/* protects limit and usage */

                                            ^^^^^

+
+	wait_queue_head_t waitqueue;
+};

....

+static void __calc_reserve(struct mem_reserve *res, long pages, long limit)
+{
+	unsigned long flags;
+
+	for ( ; res; res = res->parent) {
+		res->pages += pages;
+
+		if (limit) {
+			spin_lock_irqsave(&res->lock, flags);
+			res->limit += limit;
+			spin_unlock_irqrestore(&res->lock, flags);
+		}
+	}
+}

I cannot figure out why the spinlock is being used to protect updates
to 'limit'.
As far as I can see, mem_reserve_mutex already protects all those
updates.
Certainly we need the spinlock for usage, but why for limit??

+
+void *___kmalloc_reserve(size_t size, gfp_t flags, int node, void *ip,
+			 struct mem_reserve *res, int *emerg)
+{

....

+	if (emerg)
+		*emerg |= 1;

Why not just

	if (emerg)
		*emerg = 1.

I can't we where '*emerg' can have any value but 0 or 1, so the '|' is
pointless ???

Thanks,
NeilBrown