mm, percpu: do not consider sleepable allocations atomic
28307d938fb2 ("percpu: make pcpu_alloc() aware of current gfp context")
has fixed a reclaim recursion for scoped GFP_NOFS context. It has done
that by avoiding taking pcpu_alloc_mutex. This is a correct solution as
the worker context with full GFP_KERNEL allocation/reclaim power and which
is using the same lock cannot block the NOFS pcpu_alloc caller.
On the other hand this is a very conservative approach that could lead to
failures because pcpu_alloc lockless implementation is quite limited.
We have a bug report about premature failures when scsi array of 193
devices is scanned. Sometimes (not consistently) the scanning aborts
because the iscsid daemon fails to create the queue for a random scsi
device during the scan. iscsid itslef is running with PR_SET_IO_FLUSHER
set so all allocations from this process context are GFP_NOIO. This in
turn makes any pcpu_alloc lockless (without pcpu_alloc_mutex) which leads
to pre-mature failures.
It has turned out that iscsid has worked around this by dropping
PR_SET_IO_FLUSHER (https://github.com/open-iscsi/open-iscsi/pull/382) when
scanning host. But we can do better in this case on the kernel side and
use pcpu_alloc_mutex for NOIO resp. NOFS constrained allocation scopes
too. We just need the WQ worker to never trigger IO/FS reclaim. Achieve
that by enforcing scoped GFP_NOIO for the whole execution of
pcpu_balance_workfn (this will imply NOFS constrain as well). This will
remove the dependency chain and preserve the full allocation power of the
pcpu_alloc call.
While at it make is_atomic really test for blockable allocations.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250206122633.167896-1-mhocko@kernel.org
Fixes: 28307d938fb2 ("percpu: make pcpu_alloc() aware of current gfp context")
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Dennis Zhou <dennis@kernel.org>
Cc: Filipe David Manana <fdmanana@suse.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>