Re: OOM detection regressions since 4.7

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 7:52 AM, Olaf Hering <olaf@aepfle.de> wrote:
>
> Today I noticed the nfsserver was disabled, probably since months already.
> Starting it gives a OOM, not sure if this is new with 4.7+.

That's not an oom, that's just an allocation failure.

And with order-4, that's actually pretty normal. Nobody should use
order-4 (that's 16 contiguous pages, fragmentation can easily make
that hard - *much* harder than the small order-2 or order-2 cases that
we should largely be able to rely on).

In fact, people who do multi-order allocations should always have a
fallback, and use __GFP_NOWARN.

> [93348.306406] Call Trace:
> [93348.306490]  [<ffffffff81198cef>] __alloc_pages_slowpath+0x1af/0xa10
> [93348.306501]  [<ffffffff811997a0>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x250/0x290
> [93348.306511]  [<ffffffff811f1c3d>] cache_grow_begin+0x8d/0x540
> [93348.306520]  [<ffffffff811f23d1>] fallback_alloc+0x161/0x200
> [93348.306530]  [<ffffffff811f43f2>] __kmalloc+0x1d2/0x570
> [93348.306589]  [<ffffffffa08f025a>] nfsd_reply_cache_init+0xaa/0x110 [nfsd]

Hmm. That's kmalloc itself falling back after already failing to grow
the slab cache earlier (the earlier allocations *were* done with
NOWARN afaik).

It does look like nfsdstarts out by allocating the hash table with one
single fairly big allocation, and has no fallback position.

I suspect the code expects to be started at boot time, when this just
isn't an issue. The fact that you loaded the nfsd kernel module with
memory already fragmented after heavy use is likely why nobody else
has seen this.

Adding the nfsd people to the cc, because just from a robustness
standpoint I suspect it would be better if the code did something like

 (a) shrink the hash table if the allocation fails (we've got some
examples of that elsewhere)

or

 (b) fall back on a vmalloc allocation (that's certainly the simpler model)

We do have a "kvfree()" helper function for the "free either a kmalloc
or vmalloc allocation" but we don't actually have a good helper
pattern for the allocation side. People just do it by hand, at least
partly because we have so many different ways to allocate things -
zeroing, non-zeroing, node-specific or not, atomic or not (atomic
cannot fall back to vmalloc, obviously) etc etc.

Bruce, Jeff, comments?

             Linus

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