slub: never fail to shrink cache

SLUB's version of __kmem_cache_shrink() not only removes empty slabs, but
also tries to rearrange the partial lists to place slabs filled up most to
the head to cope with fragmentation.  To achieve that, it allocates a
temporary array of lists used to sort slabs by the number of objects in
use.  If the allocation fails, the whole procedure is aborted.

This is unacceptable for the kernel memory accounting extension of the
memory cgroup, where we want to make sure that kmem_cache_shrink()
successfully discarded empty slabs.  Although the allocation failure is
utterly unlikely with the current page allocator implementation, which
retries GFP_KERNEL allocations of order <= 2 infinitely, it is better not
to rely on that.

This patch therefore makes __kmem_cache_shrink() allocate the array on
stack instead of calling kmalloc, which may fail.  The array size is
chosen to be equal to 32, because most SLUB caches store not more than 32
objects per slab page.  Slab pages with <= 32 free objects are sorted
using the array by the number of objects in use and promoted to the head
of the partial list, while slab pages with > 32 free objects are left in
the end of the list without any ordering imposed on them.

Signed-off-by: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov@parallels.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 file changed