All of lore.kernel.org
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: knikanth@suse.de, jens.axboe@oracle.com, neilb@suse.de,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, chris.mason@oracle.com,
	shaggy@austin.ibm.com, xfs-masters@oss.sgi.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] Handle bio_alloc failure
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:46:04 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20090414114604.2d552cbb.akpm@linux-foundation.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20090414181632.GI955@mit.edu>

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:16:32 -0400
Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> In include/linux/page_alloc.h,
> __GFP_NOFAIL is documented as "will never fail", but it says
> absolutely nothing about __GFP_WAIT.

In the present implementation, a __GFP_WAIT allocation for order <=3
will only fail if the caller was oom-killed.

Which raises the question "what happens when a mempool_alloc() caller
gets oom-killed?".

Seems that it will loop around in mempool_alloc() doing weak attempts
to allocate memory, not doing direct reclaim while waiting for someone
else to free something up.  hm.  I guess it'll recover eventually.


  parent reply	other threads:[~2009-04-14 18:51 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2009-04-14 11:06 [PATCH 0/6] Handle bio_alloc failure Nikanth Karthikesan
2009-04-14 11:18 ` Jens Axboe
2009-04-14 11:41   ` Nikanth Karthikesan
2009-04-14 18:16     ` Theodore Tso
2009-04-14 18:20       ` Jens Axboe
2009-04-14 18:33         ` Theodore Tso
2009-04-14 18:40           ` Jens Axboe
2009-04-14 18:46       ` Andrew Morton [this message]
2009-04-15  8:46         ` Nick Piggin

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=20090414114604.2d552cbb.akpm@linux-foundation.org \
    --to=akpm@linux-foundation.org \
    --cc=chris.mason@oracle.com \
    --cc=jens.axboe@oracle.com \
    --cc=knikanth@suse.de \
    --cc=linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org \
    --cc=neilb@suse.de \
    --cc=shaggy@austin.ibm.com \
    --cc=tytso@mit.edu \
    --cc=xfs-masters@oss.sgi.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body. 
This is an external index of several public inboxes,
see mirroring instructions on how to clone and mirror
all data and code used by this external index.