[Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] Removing GFP_NOFS

[Johannes Thumshirn]

On 05.01.24 11:57, Jan Kara wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Thu 04-01-24 21:17:16, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> This is primarily a _FILESYSTEM_ track topic.  All the work has already
>> been done on the MM side; the FS people need to do their part.  It could
>> be a joint session, but I'm not sure there's much for the MM people
>> to say.
>>
>> There are situations where we need to allocate memory, but cannot call
>> into the filesystem to free memory.  Generally this is because we're
>> holding a lock or we've started a transaction, and attempting to write
>> out dirty folios to reclaim memory would result in a deadlock.
>>
>> The old way to solve this problem is to specify GFP_NOFS when allocating
>> memory.  This conveys little information about what is being protected
>> against, and so it is hard to know when it might be safe to remove.
>> It's also a reflex -- many filesystem authors use GFP_NOFS by default
>> even when they could use GFP_KERNEL because there's no risk of deadlock.
>>
>> The new way is to use the scoped APIs -- memalloc_nofs_save() and
>> memalloc_nofs_restore().  These should be called when we start a
>> transaction or take a lock that would cause a GFP_KERNEL allocation to
>> deadlock.  Then just use GFP_KERNEL as normal.  The memory allocators
>> can see the nofs situation is in effect and will not call back into
>> the filesystem.
>>
>> This results in better code within your filesystem as you don't need to
>> pass around gfp flags as much, and can lead to better performance from
>> the memory allocators as GFP_NOFS will not be used unnecessarily.
>>
>> The memalloc_nofs APIs were introduced in May 2017, but we still have
>> over 1000 uses of GFP_NOFS in fs/ today (and 200 outside fs/, which is
>> really sad).  This session is for filesystem developers to talk about
>> what they need to do to fix up their own filesystem, or share stories
>> about how they made their filesystem better by adopting the new APIs.
> 
> I agree this is a worthy goal and the scoped API helped us a lot in the
> ext4/jbd2 land. Still we have some legacy to deal with:
> 
> ~> git grep "NOFS" fs/jbd2/ | wc -l
> 15
> ~> git grep "NOFS" fs/ext4/ | wc -l
> 71
>

For everyone following out there being curious:
1 - affs
1 - cachefiles
1 - ecryptfs
1 - fscache
1 - notify
1 - squashfs
1 - vboxsf
1 - zonefs
2 - hfsplus
2 - tracefs
3 - 9p
3 - ext2
3 - iomap
5 - befs
5 - exfat
5 - fat
5 - udf
5 - ufs
7 - erofs
10 - fuse
11 - smb
14 - hpfs
15 - jbd2
17 - crypto
17 - jfs
17 - quota
17 - reiserfs
18 - nfs
18 - nilfs2
21 - ntfs
30 - xfs
37 - bcachefs
46 - gfs2
47 - afs
55 - dlm
61 - f2fs
63 - ceph
66 - ext4
71 - ocfs2
74 - ntfs3
84 - ubifs
199 - btrfs

As I've already feared we (as in btrfs) are the worst here.