On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 5:46 AM Michal Hocko mhocko@suse.com wrote:
On Thu 17-12-20 13:52:41, Pavel Tatashin wrote: [...]
+#define PINNABLE_MIGRATE_MAX 10 +#define PINNABLE_ISOLATE_MAX 100
Why would we need to limit the isolation retries. Those should always be temporary failure unless I am missing something.
Actually, during development, I was retrying isolate errors infinitely, but during testing found a hung where when FOLL_TOUCH without FOLL_WRITE is passed (fault in kernel without write flag), the zero page is faulted. The isolation of the zero page was failing every time, therefore the process was hanging.
Since then, I fixed this problem by adding FOLL_WRITE unconditionally to FOLL_LONGTERM, but I was worried about other possible bugs that would cause hangs, so decided to limit isolation errors. If you think it its not necessary, I can unlimit isolate retires.
I am not sure about the PINNABLE_MIGRATE_MAX either. Why do we want to limit that? migrate_pages already implements its retry logic why do you want to count retries on top of that? I do agree that the existing logic is suboptimal because
True, but again, just recently, I worked on a race bug where pages can end up in per-cpu list after lru_add_drain_all() but before isolation, so I think retry is necessary.
the migration failure might be ephemeral or permanent but that should be IMHO addressed at migrate_pages (resp. unmap_and_move) and simply report failures that are permanent - e.g. any potential pre-existing long term pin - if that is possible at all. If not what would cause permanent migration failure? OOM?
Yes, OOM is the main cause for migration failures. And also a few cases described in movable zone comment, where it is possible during boot some pages can be allocated by memblock in movable zone due to lack of memory resources (even if those resources were added later), hardware page poisoning is another rare example.
-- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs