While I play inhouse patches with much memory pressure on qemu-kvm,
3.14 kernel was randomly crashed. The reason was kernel stack overflow.
When I investigated the problem, the callstack was a little bit deeper
by involve with reclaim functions but not direct reclaim path.
I tried to diet stack size of some functions related with alloc/reclaim
so did a hundred of byte but overflow was't disappeard so that I encounter
overflow by another deeper callstack on reclaim/allocator path.
Of course, we might sweep every sites we have found for reducing
stack usage but I'm not sure how long it saves the world(surely,
lots of developer start to add nice features which will use stack
agains) and if we consider another more complex feature in I/O layer
and/or reclaim path, it might be better to increase stack size(
meanwhile, stack usage on 64bit machine was doubled compared to 32bit
while it have sticked to 8K. Hmm, it's not a fair to me and arm64
already expaned to 16K. )
So, my stupid idea is just let's expand stack size and keep an eye
toward stack consumption on each kernel functions via stacktrace of ftrace.
For example, we can have a bar like that each funcion shouldn't exceed 200K
and emit the warning when some function consumes more in runtime.
Of course, it could make false positive but at least, it could make a
chance to think over it.
I guess this topic was discussed several time so there might be
strong reason not to increase kernel stack size on x86_64, for me not
knowing so Ccing x86_64 maintainers, other MM guys and virtio
maintainers.
Here's an example call trace using up the kernel stack:
[ Note: the problem is exacerbated by certain gcc versions that seem to
generate much bigger stack frames due to apparently bad coalescing of
temporaries and generating too many spills. Rusty saw gcc-4.6.4 using
35% more stack on the virtio path than 4.8.2 does, for example.
Minchan not only uses such a bad gcc version (4.6.3 in his case), but
some of the stack use is due to debugging (CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC is
what causes that kernel_map_pages() frame, for example). But we're
clearly getting too close.
The VM code also seems to have excessive stack frames partly for the
same compiler reason, triggered by excessive inlining and lots of
function arguments.
We need to improve on our stack use, but in the meantime let's do this
simple stack increase too. Unlike most earlier reports, there is
nothing simple that stands out as being really horribly wrong here,
apart from the fact that the stack frames are just bigger than they
should need to be. - Linus ]
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Cc: Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> Cc: Michael S Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> Cc: PJ Waskiewicz <pjwaskiewicz@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>