Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm/mempolicy: Skip extra call to __alloc_pages_bulk in weighted interleave

[Andrew Morton]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:21:14 -0700 Joshua Hahn <joshua.hahnjy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > This is a goto into the middle of a for-loop.
> > What do you think is going to happen at the end of that loop?
> > 
> > I think (only tested with a small C program) it will go to the start of
> > the loop, do the i++, check i<nnodes, and possibly do the loop again.
> > Variable i is uninitialized at that point. In the loop it hits several
> > uninitialized variables.
> 
> >From what I can see from my code, I think the only the goto statement leads
> to a second iteration of the for loop is if allocation fails.
> But otherwise, it should be ok since we always hit
> 
> if (total_allocated == nr_pages)
> 	break;
> 
> within the loop. For the branch that takes the goto, we set
> node_pages = rem_pages, then jump to the label and allocate.
> So nr_allocated = node_pages, and total_allocated = 0 + nr_allocated
> so total_allocated = node_pages
> 
> total_allocated == node_pages == rem_pages == nr_pages, so we will break. Phew!
> 
> To cover the case where allocation fails, I think we should be breaking
> anyways, so I can definitely add a new check for this.

I do agree, that goto is a "goto too far".  That we can do a thing
doesn't mean we should do it!

> > Even if this is legal C code, it is pretty obscure.
> 
> I agree that it not very clean. I did this to reduce the amount of repeated
> code there is. Even if this code works, it could definitely be written
> better to make it more readable and maintainable. As I noted in my second
> response to Gregory, I'm not planning on pursuing this version anymore,
> so if I decide to send a second version, I'll keep this in mind.

Cool, I'll drop this version from mm-unstable.