Re: [PATCH 0/2] Reduce number of GFP_ATOMIC allocation failures

[Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 08:34:21PM +0200, Karol Lewandowski wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 11:37:24AM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > The following two patches against 2.6.32-rc4 should reduce allocation
> > failure reports for GFP_ATOMIC allocations that have being cropping up
> > since 2.6.31-rc1.
> ...
> > The patches should also help the following bugs as well and testing there
> > would be appreciated.
> > 
> > [Bug #14265] ifconfig: page allocation failure. order:5, mode:0x8020 w/ e100
> > 
> > It might also have helped the following bug
> 
> These patches actually made situation kind-of "worse" for this
> particular issue.
> 
> I've tried patches with post 2.6.32-rc4 kernel and after second
> suspend-resume cycle I got typical "order:5" failure.  However, this
> time when I manually tried to bring interface up ("ifup eth0") it
> failed for 4 consecutive times with "Can't allocate memory".  Before
> applying these patches this never occured -- kernel sometimes failed
> to allocate memory during resume, but it *never* failed afterwards.
> 

I'm hoping the patch + the revert which I asked for in another mail will
help. It's been clear for a while that more than one thing went wrong
during this cycle.

> I'll go now for another round of bisecting... and hopefully this time
> I'll be able to trigger this problem on different/faster computer with
> e100-based card.
> 
> 
> > although that driver has already been fixed by not making high-order
> > atomic allocations.
> 
> Driver has been fixed?  The one patch that I saw (by davem[1]) didn't
> fix this issue.  As of 2.6.32-rc5 I see no fixes to e100.c in
> mainline, has there been another than this[1] fix posted somewhere?
> 
> [1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/10/12/169
> 

The driver that was fixed was for the ipw2200, not the e100.

Thanks

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab