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Commit 84861885 authored by Joel Fernandes's avatar Joel Fernandes Committed by Steven Rostedt (VMware)
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tracing/ring_buffer: Try harder to allocate



ftrace can fail to allocate per-CPU ring buffer on systems with a large
number of CPUs coupled while large amounts of cache happening in the
page cache. Currently the ring buffer allocation doesn't retry in the VM
implementation even if direct-reclaim made some progress but still
wasn't able to find a free page. On retrying I see that the allocations
almost always succeed. The retry doesn't happen because __GFP_NORETRY is
used in the tracer to prevent the case where we might OOM, however if we
drop __GFP_NORETRY, we risk destabilizing the system if OOM killer is
triggered. To prevent this situation, use the __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL flag
introduced recently [1].

Tested the following still succeeds without destabilizing a system with
1GB memory.
echo 300000 > /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/buffer_size_kb

[1] https://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=149820805124906&w=2

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170713021416.8897-1-joelaf@google.com

Cc: Tim Murray <timmurray@google.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: default avatarJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: default avatarMichal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJoel Fernandes <joelaf@google.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
parent 5771a8c0
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