When the user specifies too many hugepages or an invalid
default_hugepagesz the communication to the user is implicit in the
allocation message. This patch adds a warning when the desired page
count is not allocated and prints an error when the default_hugepagesz
is invalid on boot.
During boot hugepages will allocate until there is a fraction of the
hugepage size left. That is, we allocate until either the request is
satisfied or memory for the pages is exhausted. When memory for the
pages is exhausted, it will most likely lead to the system failing with
the OOM manager not finding enough (or anything) to kill (unless you're
using really big hugepages in the order of 100s of MB or in the GBs).
The user will most likely see the OOM messages much later in the boot
sequence than the implicitly stated message. Worse yet, you may even
get an OOM for each processor which causes many pages of OOMs on modern
systems. Although these messages will be printed earlier than the OOM
messages, at least giving the user errors and warnings will highlight
the configuration as an issue. I'm trying to point the user in the
right direction by providing a more robust statement of what is failing.
During the sysctl or echo command, the user can check the results much
easier than if the system hangs during boot and the scenario of having
nothing to OOM for kernel memory is highly unlikely.
Mike said:
"Before sending out this patch, I asked Liam off list why he was doing
it. Was it something he just thought would be useful? Or, was there
some type of user situation/need. He said that he had been called in
to assist on several occasions when a system OOMed during boot. In
almost all of these situations, the user had grossly misconfigured
huge pages.
DB users want to pre-allocate just the right amount of huge pages, but
sometimes they can be really off. In such situations, the huge page
init code just allocates as many huge pages as it can and reports the
number allocated. There is no indication that it quit allocating
because it ran out of memory. Of course, a user could compare the
number in the message to what they requested on the command line to
determine if they got all the huge pages they requested. The thought
was that it would be useful to at least flag this situation. That way,
the user might be able to better relate the huge page allocation
failure to the OOM.
I'm not sure if the e-mail discussion made it obvious that this is
something he has seen on several occasions.
I see Michal's point that this will only flag the situation where
someone configures huge pages very badly. And, a more extensive look
at the situation of misconfiguring huge pages might be in order. But,
this has happened on several occasions which led to the creation of
this patch"
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: reposition memfmt() to avoid forward declaration]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170603005413.10380-1-Liam.Howlett@Oracle.com
Signed-off-by: Liam R. Howlett <Liam.Howlett@Oracle.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
Cc: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@de.ibm.com>
Cc: zhongjiang <zhongjiang@huawei.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: "Kirill A . Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
d715cf804a