Re: [PATCH percpu/for-3.17 1/2] percpu: implement percpu_pool

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

Hello, Andrew.

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 06:16:56PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Yet nowhere in either the changelog or the code comments is it even
> mentioned that this allocator is unreliable and that callers *must*
> implement (and test!) fallback paths.

Hmmm, yeah, somehow the atomic behavior seemed obvious to me.  I'll
try to make it clear that this thing can and does fail.

> > an obvious solution is adding a failure
> > injection for debugging, but really except for being a bit ghetto,
> > this is just the atomic allocation for percpu areas.
> 
> If it was a try-GFP_ATOMIC-then-fall-back-to-pool thing then it would
> work fairly well.  But it's not even that - a caller could trivially
> chew through that pool in a single timeslice.  Especially on !SMP. 
> Especially squared with !PREEMPT or SCHED_FIFO.

Yeap, occassional pool depletion would be a normal thing to happen,
which isn't a correctness issue and most likely not even a performance
issue.

> But please make very sure that this is how we position it.  I don't
> know how to do this.  Maybe prefix the names with "blk_" to signify
> that it is block-private (and won't even be there if !CONFIG_BLOCK).
> 
> Or rename percpu_pool_alloc() to percpu_pool_try_alloc() - that should
> wake people up.

Sounds good to me.  I'll rename it to percpu_pool_try_alloc() and make
it clear in the comment that the allocation is opportunistic.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun