>> >From: Julia Lawall <julia.law...@lip6.fr>
>> >
>> >Replace OBD_ALLOC, OBD_ALLOC_WAIT, OBD_ALLOC_PTR, and OBD_ALLOC_PTR_WAIT by
>> >kalloc/kcalloc, and OBD_FREE and OBD_FREE_PTR by kfree.
>> 
>> Nak: James Simmons <jsimm...@infradead.org>
>> 
>> A simple replace will not work. The OBD_ALLOC and OBD_FREE functions 
>> allocate memory
>> anywhere from one page to 4MB in size. You can't use kmalloc for the 4MB 
>> allocations.
>> Currently lustre uses  a 4 page water mark to determine if we allocate using 
>> vmalloc. Even
>> using kmalloc for 4 pages has shown high failure rates on some systems. It 
>> gets even more
>> messy with 64K page systems like ppc64 boxes. Now I'm not suggesting to port 
>> the larger
>> allocations to vmalloc either since issues have been founded with using 
>> vmalloc. For example
>> when using large stripe count files the MDS rpc generated crosses the 4 page 
>> line and vmalloc
>> is used. Using vmalloc caused a global spinlock to be taken which causes 
>> meta data operations
>> to serialized on the MDS servers.
>
>It's not the LARGE functions that do the switching?  For example OBD_ALLOC 
>ends up at  __OBD_MALLOC_VERBOSE, which as far as I can see calls kmalloc 
>(with __GFP_ZERO, and hance the use of kzalloc).

Yes the LARGE functions do the switching. I was expecting also patches to 
remove the 
OBD_ALLOC_LARGE functions as well which is not the case here.  I do have one 
question still. The
macro __OBD_MALLOC_VERBOSE allowed the ability to simulate memory allocation 
failures at
a certain percentage rate. Does something exist in the kernel to duplicate that 
functionality?
Once these macros are gone we lose the ability to simulate high memory 
allocation failures.


--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

Reply via email to