[PATCH] drm/ttm: stop warning on TT shrinker failure

[Daniel Vetter]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 10:04 AM Christian König
<ckoenig.leichtzumerken at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Am 19.03.21 um 20:06 schrieb Daniel Vetter:
> > On Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 07:53:48PM +0100, Christian König wrote:
> >> Am 19.03.21 um 18:52 schrieb Daniel Vetter:
> >>> On Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 03:08:57PM +0100, Christian König wrote:
> >>>> Don't print a warning when we fail to allocate a page for swapping things out.
> >>>>
> >>>> Also rely on memalloc_nofs_save/memalloc_nofs_restore instead of GFP_NOFS.
> >>> Uh this part doesn't make sense. Especially since you only do it for the
> >>> debugfs file, not in general. Which means you've just completely broken
> >>> the shrinker.
> >> Are you sure? My impression is that GFP_NOFS should now work much more out
> >> of the box with the memalloc_nofs_save()/memalloc_nofs_restore().
> > Yeah, if you'd put it in the right place :-)
> >
> > But also -mm folks are very clear that memalloc_no*() family is for dire
> > situation where there's really no other way out. For anything where you
> > know what you're doing, you really should use explicit gfp flags.
>
> My impression is just the other way around. You should try to avoid the
> NOFS/NOIO flags and use the memalloc_no* approach instead.

Where did you get that idea? The kernel is full of explicit gfp_t flag
passing to make this as explicit as possible. The memalloc_no* stuff
is just for when you go through entire subsystems and really can't
wire it through. I can't find the discussion anymore, but that was the
advice I got from mm/fs people.

One reason is that generally a small GFP_KERNEL allocation never
fails. But it absolutely can fail if it's in a memalloc_no* section,
and these kind of non-obvious non-local effects are a real pain in
testing and review. Hence explicit gfp_flag passing as much as
possible.

> >>> If this is just to paper over the seq_printf doing the wrong allocations,
> >>> then just move that out from under the fs_reclaim_acquire/release part.
> >> No, that wasn't the problem.
> >>
> >> We have just seen to many failures to allocate pages for swapout and I think
> >> that would improve this because in a lot of cases we can then immediately
> >> swap things out instead of having to rely on upper layers.
> > Yeah, you broke it. Now the real shrinker is running with GFP_KERNEL,
> > because your memalloc_no is only around the debugfs function. And ofc it's
> > much easier to allocate with GFP_KERNEL, right until you deadlock :-)
>
> The problem here is that for example kswapd calls the shrinker without
> holding a FS lock as far as I can see.
>
> And it is rather sad that we can't optimize this case directly.

I'm still not clear what you want to optimize? You can check for "is
this kswapd" in pf flags, but that sounds very hairy and fragile.
-Daniel

> Anyway you are right if some caller doesn't use the memalloc_no*()
> approach we are busted.
>
> Going to change the patch to only not warn for the moment.
>
> Regards,
> Christian.
>
> >
> > Shrinking is hard, there's no easy way out here.
> >
> > Cheers, Daniel
> >
> >> Regards,
> >> Christian.
> >>
> >>
> >>> __GFP_NOWARN should be there indeed I think.
> >>> -Daniel
> >>>
> >>>> Signed-off-by: Christian König <christian.koenig at amd.com>
> >>>> ---
> >>>>    drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_tt.c | 5 ++++-
> >>>>    1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >>>>
> >>>> diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_tt.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_tt.c
> >>>> index 2f0833c98d2c..86fa3e82dacc 100644
> >>>> --- a/drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_tt.c
> >>>> +++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_tt.c
> >>>> @@ -369,7 +369,7 @@ static unsigned long ttm_tt_shrinker_scan(struct shrinker *shrink,
> >>>>            };
> >>>>            int ret;
> >>>> -  ret = ttm_bo_swapout(&ctx, GFP_NOFS);
> >>>> +  ret = ttm_bo_swapout(&ctx, GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NOWARN);
> >>>>            return ret < 0 ? SHRINK_EMPTY : ret;
> >>>>    }
> >>>> @@ -389,10 +389,13 @@ static unsigned long ttm_tt_shrinker_count(struct shrinker *shrink,
> >>>>    static int ttm_tt_debugfs_shrink_show(struct seq_file *m, void *data)
> >>>>    {
> >>>>            struct shrink_control sc = { .gfp_mask = GFP_KERNEL };
> >>>> +  unsigned int flags;
> >>>>            fs_reclaim_acquire(GFP_KERNEL);
> >>>> +  flags = memalloc_nofs_save();
> >>>>            seq_printf(m, "%lu/%lu\n", ttm_tt_shrinker_count(&mm_shrinker, &sc),
> >>>>                       ttm_tt_shrinker_scan(&mm_shrinker, &sc));
> >>>> +  memalloc_nofs_restore(flags);
> >>>>            fs_reclaim_release(GFP_KERNEL);
> >>>>            return 0;
> >>>> --
> >>>> 2.25.1
> >>>>
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> dri-devel mailing list
> >>>> dri-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> >>>> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
>


-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch