Re: [PATCH v3] lib: stackdepot: Add support to configure STACK_HASH_SIZE

[Vijayanand Jitta <vjitta@codeaurora.org>]

On 12/17/2020 4:24 PM, Alexander Potapenko wrote:
>>> Can you provide an example of a use case in which the user wants to
>>> use the stack depot of a smaller size without disabling it completely,
>>> and that size cannot be configured statically?
>>> As far as I understand, for the page owner example you gave it's
>>> sufficient to provide a switch that can disable the stack depot if
>>> page_owner=off.
>>>
>> There are two use cases here,
>>
>> 1. We don't want to consume memory when page_owner=off ,boolean flag
>> would work here.
>>
>> 2. We would want to enable page_owner on low ram devices but we don't
>> want stack depot to consume 8 MB of memory, so for this case we would
>> need a configurable stack_hash_size so that we can still use page_owner
>> with lower memory consumption.
>>
>> So, a configurable stack_hash_size would work for both these use cases,
>> we can set it to '0' for first case and set the required size for the
>> second case.
> 
> Will a combined solution with a boolean boot-time flag and a static
> CONFIG_STACKDEPOT_HASH_SIZE work for these cases?
> I suppose low-memory devices have a separate kernel config anyway?
> 

Yes, the combined solution will also work but i think having a single
run time config is simpler instead of having two things to configure.

> My concern is that exposing yet another knob to users won't really
> solve their problems, because the hash size alone doesn't give enough
> control over stackdepot memory footprint (we also have stack_slabs,
> which may get way bigger than 8Mb).
> 

True, stack_slabs can consume more memory but they consume most only
when stack depot is used as they are allocated in stack_depot_save path.
when stack depot is not used they consume 8192 * sizeof(void) bytes at
max. So nothing much we can do here since static allocation is not much
and memory consumption depends up on stack depot usage, unlike
stack_hash_table where 8mb is preallocated.
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