On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:11:22AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
If we were forbidden to call ->writepage just because of stack
overflow yes as I don't think it's big deal with memory compaction and
I see this as a too limiting design to allow ->writepage only in
kernel thread. ->writepage is also called by the pagecache layer,
msync etc.. not just by kswapd.
But let's defer this after we have any resemblance of hard numbers of
worst-case stack usage measured during the aforementioned workload, I
didn't read all the details as I'm quite against this design, but I
didn't see any stack usage number or any sign of stack-overflow debug
triggering. I'd suggest to measure the max stack usage first and worry
later.
And if ->writepage is a stack hog in some fs, I'd rather see
->writepage made less stack hungry (with proper warning at runtime
with debug option enabled) than vetoed. The VM itself shouldn't be a
stack hog already. I don't see a particular reason why writepage
should be so stuck hungry compared to the rest of the kernel, it just
have to do I/O, if it requires complex data structure it should
kmalloc those and stay light on stack as everybody else.
And if something I'm worried more about slab shrink than ->writepage
as that enters the vfs layer and then the lowlevel fs to collect the
dentry, inode etc...
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