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 dcda9b0471 ("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: Martynas Pumputis <m@lambda.lt>
Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20190318153940.GL8924@dhcp22.suse.cz/
f01a7dbe98