Re: [PATCH net 1/3] mm, percpu: add support for __GFP_NOWARN flag

On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 04:55:52PM +0200, Daniel Borkmann wrote:

Add an option for pcpu_alloc() to support __GFP_NOWARN flag.
Currently, we always throw a warning when size or alignment
is unsupported (and also dump stack on failed allocation
requests). The warning itself is harmless since we return
NULL anyway for any failed request, which callers are
required to handle anyway. However, it becomes harmful when
panic_on_warn is set.

The rationale for the WARN() in pcpu_alloc() is that it can
be tracked when larger than supported allocation requests are
made such that allocations limits can be tweaked if warranted.
This makes sense for in-kernel users, however, there are users
of pcpu allocator where allocation size is derived from user
space requests, e.g. when creating BPF maps. In these cases,
the requests should fail gracefully without throwing a splat.

The current work-around was to check allocation size against
the upper limit of PCPU_MIN_UNIT_SIZE from call-sites for
bailing out prior to a call to pcpu_alloc() in order to
avoid throwing the WARN(). This is bad in multiple ways since
PCPU_MIN_UNIT_SIZE is an implementation detail, and having
the checks on call-sites only complicates the code for no
good reason. Thus, lets fix it generically by supporting the
__GFP_NOWARN flag that users can then use with calling the
__alloc_percpu_gfp() helper instead.

Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>

The approach looks great to me. We've been doing this dance around
allocator warning for long time. It's really not a job of bpf code
to guess into valid parameters of pcpu alloc.
Adding support for __GFP_NOWARN and using it in bpf is much cleaner
fix that avoids layering violations.

Acked-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>