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Linus Torvalds authored
This is the new-and-improved attempt at avoiding huge memory load spikes when the user space boot sequence tries to load hundreds (or even thousands) of redundant duplicate modules in parallel. See commit 9828ed3f ("module: error out early on concurrent load of the same module file") for background and an earlier failed attempt that was reverted. That earlier attempt just said "concurrently loading the same module is silly, just open the module file exclusively and return -ETXTBSY if somebody else is already loading it". While it is true that concurrent module loads of the same module is silly, the reason that earlier attempt then failed was that the concurrently loaded module would often be a prerequisite for another module. Thus failing to load the prerequisite would then cause cascading failures of the other modules, rather than just short-circuiting that one unnecessary module load. At the same time, we still really don't want to load the contents of the same module file hundreds of times, only to then wait for an eventually successful load, and have everybody else return -EEXIST. As a result, this takes another approach, and treats concurrent module loads from the same file as "idempotent" in the inode. So if one module load is ongoing, we don't start a new one, but instead just wait for the first one to complete and return the same return value as it did. So unlike the first attempt, this does not return early: the intent is not to speed up the boot, but to avoid a thundering herd problem in allocating memory (both physical and virtual) for a module more than once. Also note that this does change behavior: it used to be that when you had concurrent loads, you'd have one "winner" that would return success, and everybody else would return -EEXIST. In contrast, this idempotent logic goes all Oprah on the problem, and says "You are a winner! And you are a winner! We are ALL winners". But since there's no possible actual real semantic difference between "you loaded the module" and "somebody else already loaded the module", this is more of a feel-good change than an actual honest-to-goodness semantic change. Of course, any true Johnny-come-latelies that don't get caught in the concurrency filter will still return -EEXIST. It's no different from not even getting a seat at an Oprah taping. That's life. See the long thread on the kernel mailing list about this all, which includes some numbers for memory use before and after the patch. Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230524213620.3509138-1-mcgrof@kernel.org/Reviewed-by: Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org> Tested-by: Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org> Tested-by: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org> Tested-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> Tested-by: Rudi Heitbaum <rudi@heitbaum..com> Tested-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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