Kernel build fails on ARM: Cannot fork: Cannot allocate memory
Jeff Roberson
jroberson at jroberson.net
Fri Jun 21 00:03:29 UTC 2013
On Thu, 20 Jun 2013, Jeff Roberson wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jun 2013, Zbyszek Bodek wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I've been trying to compile the kernel on my ARMv7 platform using the
>> sources from the current FreeBSD HEAD.
>>
>> make buildkernel <.....> -j5
>>
>> 1/2 builds fails in the way described below:
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ing-include-dirs -fdiagnostics-show-option -nostdinc -I.
>> -I/root/src/freebsd-arm-superpages/sys
>> -I/root/src/freebsd-arm-superpages/sys/contrib/altq
>> -I/root/src/freebsd-arm-superpages/sys/contrib/libfdt -D_KERNEL
>> -DHAVE_KERNEL_OPTION_HEADERS -include opt_global.h -fno-common
>> -finline-limit=8000 --param inline-unit-growth=100 --param
>> large-function-growth=1000 -mno-thumb-interwork -ffreestanding -Werror
>> /root/src/freebsd-arm-superpages/sys/ufs/ffs/ffs_snapshot.c
>> Cannot fork: Cannot allocate memory
>> *** [ffs_snapshot.o] Error code 2
>> 1 error
>> *** [buildkernel] Error code 2
>> 1 error
>> *** [buildkernel] Error code 2
>> 1 error
>> 5487.888u 481.569s 7:35.65 1310.0% 1443+167k 1741+5388io 221pf+0w
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> The warning from std err is:
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> vm_thread_new: kstack allocation failed
>> vm_thread_new: kstack allocation failed
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I was trying to find out which commit is causing this (because I was
>> previously working on some older revision) and using bisect I got to:
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Author: jeff <jeff at FreeBSD.org>
>> Date: Tue Jun 18 04:50:20 2013 +0000
>>
>> Refine UMA bucket allocation to reduce space consumption and improve
>> performance.
>>
>> - Always free to the alloc bucket if there is space. This gives LIFO
>> allocation order to improve hot-cache performance. This also allows
>> for zones with a single bucket per-cpu rather than a pair if the
>> entire
>> working set fits in one bucket.
>> - Enable per-cpu caches of buckets. To prevent recursive bucket
>> allocation one bucket zone still has per-cpu caches disabled.
>> - Pick the initial bucket size based on a table driven maximum size
>> per-bucket rather than the number of items per-page. This gives
>> more sane initial sizes.
>> - Only grow the bucket size when we face contention on the zone
>> lock, this
>> causes bucket sizes to grow more slowly.
>> - Adjust the number of items per-bucket to account for the header
>> space.
>> This packs the buckets more efficiently per-page while making them
>> not quite powers of two.
>> - Eliminate the per-zone free bucket list. Always return buckets back
>> to the bucket zone. This ensures that as zones grow into larger
>> bucket sizes they eventually discard the smaller sizes. It persists
>> fewer buckets in the system. The locking is slightly trickier.
>> - Only switch buckets in zalloc, not zfree, this eliminates
>> pathological
>> cases where we ping-pong between two buckets.
>> - Ensure that the thread that fills a new bucket gets to allocate from
>> it to give a better upper bound on allocation time.
>>
>> Sponsored by: EMC / Isilon Storage Division
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I checked this several times and this commits seems to be causing this.
>
> Can you tell me how many cores and how much memory you have? And paste the
> output of vmstat -z when you see this error.
>
> You can try changing bucket_select() at line 339 in uma_core.c to read:
>
> static int
> bucket_select(int size)
> {
> return (MAX(PAGE_SIZE / size, 1));
> }
>
> This will approximate the old bucket sizing behavior.
Just to add some more information; On my machine with 16GB of ram the
handful of recent UMA commits save about 20MB of kmem on boot. There are
30% fewer buckets allocated. And all of the malloc zones have similar
amounts of cached space. Actually the page size malloc bucket is taking
up much less space.
I don't know if the problem is unique to arm but I have tested x86 limited
to 512MB of ram without trouble. I will need the stats I mentioned before
to understand what has happened.
Jeff
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>
>>
>> Does anyone observe similar behavior or have a solution?
>>
>> Best regards
>> Zbyszek Bodek
>>
>
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