[dm-devel] New dm-bufio with shrinker API

Mikulas Patocka mpatocka at redhat.com
Wed Sep 7 18:47:40 UTC 2011



On Tue, 6 Sep 2011, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 11:57:00AM -0400, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> > > IS there any reason you'll need a fixed size?  This is fairly similar in
> > > concept to the XFS buffercache, which does perfectly well by allocation
> > > memory as needed, and letting the shrinker reclaim buffers when under
> > > memory pressure.
> > 
> > It is possible to make unlimited size. --- the question: is the shrinker 
> > run when we exhaust vmalloc arena?
> > 
> > dm-bufio cache uses vmalloc arena under some circumstances. On some 
> > architectures (for example i386), vmalloc arena is smaller than main 
> > memory, therefore it may overflow before main memory does.
> > 
> > What does XFS do when vmalloc arena is exhausted?
> 
> At this point shrinkers do not handle vmalloc space, although we could
> add them.  In the default configuration XFS uses very little vmalloc
> space in the buffer cache - only the 8 log buffers are vmapped, and
> those can't be reclaimed anyway.  During log recovery or if using the
> non-standard larger directory block mkfs option it can consume a larger
> amount of vmalloc space, and we have run into problems because of that,
> e.g. take a look at the loop around vm_map_ram() in _xfs_buf_map_pages()
> that we had to add as a workaround, and the commit introducing it for
> more details (a19fb380).

I see --- but: shouldn't vm_map_ram() do its own cleanup and call 
vm_unmap_aliases() accordingly? Do you mean that any function that 
allocates something from vmalloc area needs to call vm_unmap_aliases() and 
retry in case of failure?

> Just curious, why do you need the buffers to be vmapped?  If we'd design
> the dir2 format these days we'd make sure it is aligned in a way that
> we could deal with individually mapped pages.

I need it if we use larger buffers than pages. They are allocated with 
get_free_pages, but it is unreliable and has its own limit, so I use 
vmalloc as a reliable backup.

Mikulas




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