Michal Hocko 0ee931c4e3 mm: treewide: remove GFP_TEMPORARY allocation flag ... GFP_TEMPORARY was introduced by commit e12ba74d8f ("Group short-lived and reclaimable kernel allocations") along with __GFP_RECLAIMABLE. It's primary motivation was to allow users to tell that an allocation is short lived and so the allocator can try to place such allocations close together and prevent long term fragmentation. As much as this sounds like a reasonable semantic it becomes much less clear when to use the highlevel GFP_TEMPORARY allocation flag. How long is temporary? Can the context holding that memory sleep? Can it take locks? It seems there is no good answer for those questions. The current implementation of GFP_TEMPORARY is basically GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_RECLAIMABLE which in itself is tricky because basically none of the existing caller provide a way to reclaim the allocated memory. So this is rather misleading and hard to evaluate for any benefits. I have checked some random users and none of them has added the flag with a specific justification. I suspect most of them just copied from other existing users and others just thought it might be a good idea to use without any measuring. This suggests that GFP_TEMPORARY just motivates for cargo cult usage without any reasoning. I believe that our gfp flags are quite complex already and especially those with highlevel semantic should be clearly defined to prevent from confusion and abuse. Therefore I propose dropping GFP_TEMPORARY and replace all existing users to simply use GFP_KERNEL. Please note that SLAB users with shrinkers will still get __GFP_RECLAIMABLE heuristic and so they will be placed properly for memory fragmentation prevention. I can see reasons we might want some gfp flag to reflect shorterm allocations but I propose starting from a clear semantic definition and only then add users with proper justification. This was been brought up before LSF this year by Matthew [1] and it turned out that GFP_TEMPORARY really doesn't have a clear semantic. It seems to be a heuristic without any measured advantage for most (if not all) its current users. The follow up discussion has revealed that opinions on what might be temporary allocation differ a lot between developers. So rather than trying to tweak existing users into a semantic which they haven't expected I propose to simply remove the flag and start from scratch if we really need a semantic for short term allocations. [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170118054945.GD18349@bombadil.infradead.org [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix typo] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] [sfr@canb.auug.org.au: drm/i915: fix up] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170816144703.378d4f4d@canb.auug.org.au Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170728091904.14627-1-mhocko@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Signed-off-by: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de> Cc: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>		2017-09-13 18:53:16 -07:00
..
drm	mm: treewide: remove GFP_TEMPORARY allocation flag	2017-09-13 18:53:16 -07:00
host1x	drm/tegra: Changes for v4.14-rc1	2017-08-21 17:37:33 +10:00
ipu-v3	main drm pull request for 4.14 merge window	2017-09-03 17:02:26 -07:00
vga	sched/wait: Rename wait_queue_t => wait_queue_entry_t	2017-06-20 12:18:27 +02:00
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