From 17d75422604f0b92869aa17cb44f60958212f033 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Barry Song Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2024 08:28:22 +1200 Subject: [PATCH] mm: document __GFP_NOFAIL must be blockable MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Non-blocking allocation with __GFP_NOFAIL is not supported and may still result in NULL pointers (if we don't return NULL, we result in busy-loop within non-sleepable contexts): static inline struct page * __alloc_pages_slowpath(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order, struct alloc_context *ac) { ... /* * Make sure that __GFP_NOFAIL request doesn't leak out and make sure * we always retry */ if (gfp_mask & __GFP_NOFAIL) { /* * All existing users of the __GFP_NOFAIL are blockable, so warn * of any new users that actually require GFP_NOWAIT */ if (WARN_ON_ONCE_GFP(!can_direct_reclaim, gfp_mask)) goto fail; ... } ... fail: warn_alloc(gfp_mask, ac->nodemask, "page allocation failure: order:%u", order); got_pg: return page; } Highlight this in the documentation of __GFP_NOFAIL so that non-mm subsystems can reject any illegal usage of __GFP_NOFAIL with GFP_ATOMIC, GFP_NOWAIT, etc. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240830202823.21478-3-21cnbao@gmail.com Signed-off-by: Barry Song Acked-by: Michal Hocko Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka Acked-by: Davidlohr Bueso Acked-by: David Hildenbrand Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: David Rientjes Cc: "Eugenio PĂ©rez" Cc: Hailong.Liu Cc: Hyeonggon Yoo <42.hyeyoo@gmail.com> Cc: Jason Wang Cc: Joonsoo Kim Cc: Kees Cook Cc: Linus Torvalds Cc: Lorenzo Stoakes Cc: Maxime Coquelin Cc: "Michael S. Tsirkin" Cc: Pekka Enberg Cc: Roman Gushchin Cc: Uladzislau Rezki (Sony) Cc: Xuan Zhuo Cc: Christoph Hellwig Cc: Xie Yongji Cc: Yafang Shao Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- include/linux/gfp_types.h | 5 ++++- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/include/linux/gfp_types.h b/include/linux/gfp_types.h index 313be4ad79fd..4a1fa7706b0c 100644 --- a/include/linux/gfp_types.h +++ b/include/linux/gfp_types.h @@ -215,7 +215,8 @@ enum { * the caller still has to check for failures) while costly requests try to be * not disruptive and back off even without invoking the OOM killer. * The following three modifiers might be used to override some of these - * implicit rules. + * implicit rules. Please note that all of them must be used along with + * %__GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM flag. * * %__GFP_NORETRY: The VM implementation will try only very lightweight * memory direct reclaim to get some memory under memory pressure (thus @@ -246,6 +247,8 @@ enum { * cannot handle allocation failures. The allocation could block * indefinitely but will never return with failure. Testing for * failure is pointless. + * It _must_ be blockable and used together with __GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM. + * It should _never_ be used in non-sleepable contexts. * New users should be evaluated carefully (and the flag should be * used only when there is no reasonable failure policy) but it is * definitely preferable to use the flag rather than opencode endless