On Tue, 2 Feb 2021, Charan Teja Kalla wrote:
> >> diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
> >> index 519a60d..531f244 100644
> >> --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> >> +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> >> @@ -4152,6 +4152,8 @@ __alloc_pages_direct_compact(gfp_t gfp_mask,
> >> unsigned int order,
> >> memalloc_noreclaim_restore(noreclaim_flag);
> >> psi_memstall_leave(&pflags);
> >>
> >> + if (*compact_result == COMPACT_SKIPPED)
> >> + return NULL;
> >> /*
> >> * At least in one zone compaction wasn't deferred or skipped, so let's
> >> * count a compaction stall
> >
> > This makes sense, I wonder if it would also be useful to check that
> > page == NULL, either in try_to_compact_pages() or here for
> > COMPACT_SKIPPED?
>
> In the code, when COMPACT_SKIPPED is being returned, the page will
> always be NULL. So, I'm not sure how much useful it is for the page ==
> NULL check here. Or I failed to understand your point here?
>
Your code is short-circuiting the rest of __alloc_pages_direct_compact()
where the return value is dictated by whether page is NULL or non-NULL.
We can't leak a captured page if we are testing for it being NULL or
non-NULL, which is what the rest of __alloc_pages_direct_compact() does
*before* your change. So the idea was to add a check the page is actually
NULL here since you are now relying on the return value of
compact_zone_order() to be COMPACT_SKIPPED to infer page == NULL.
I agree that's currently true in the code, I was trying to catch any
errors where current->capture_control.page was non-NULL but
try_to_compact_pages() returns COMPACT_SKIPPED. There's some complexity
here.
So my idea was the expand this out to:
if (*compact_result == COMPACT_SKIPPED) {
VM_BUG_ON(page);
return NULL;
}
