• Martynas Pumputis's avatar
    bpf: Try harder when allocating memory for large maps · f01a7dbe
    Martynas Pumputis authored
    It has been observed that sometimes a higher order memory allocation
    for BPF maps fails when there is no obvious memory pressure in a system.
    E.g. the map (BPF_MAP_TYPE_LRU_HASH, key=38, value=56, max_elems=524288)
    could not be created due to vmalloc unable to allocate 75497472B,
    when the system's memory consumption (in MB) was the following:
    
        Total: 3942 Used: 837 (21.24%) Free: 138 Buffers: 239 Cached: 2727
    
    Later analysis [1] by Michal Hocko showed that the vmalloc was not trying
    to reclaim memory from the page cache and was failing prematurely due to
    __GFP_NORETRY.
    
    Considering dcda9b04 ("mm, tree wide: replace __GFP_REPEAT by
    __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL with more useful semantic") and [1], we can replace
    __GFP_NORETRY with __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL, as it won't invoke OOM killer
    and will try harder to fulfil allocation requests.
    
    Unfortunately, replacing the body of the BPF map memory allocation
    function with the kvmalloc_node helper function is not an option at
    this point in time, given 1) kmalloc is non-optional for higher order
    allocations, and 2) passing __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL to the kmalloc would
    stress the slab allocator too much for large requests.
    
    The change has been tested with the workloads mentioned above and by
    observing oom_kill value from /proc/vmstat.
    
    [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20190310071318.GW5232@dhcp22.suse.cz/Signed-off-by: default avatarMartynas Pumputis <m@lambda.lt>
    Acked-by: default avatarYonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
    Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDaniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20190318153940.GL8924@dhcp22.suse.cz/
    f01a7dbe
syscall.c 64 KB