Re: [PATCH] virtio: use __GFP_NOWARN for try_fill_recv in virtnet_poll

[Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:55:50 pm Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Tue 15-02-11 20:41:29, Rusty Russell wrote:
> > On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:05:27 pm Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > we have started seeing a lot of allocator messages complaining about
> > > failed allocations from virtnet_poll in soft IRQ. Could you consider the
> > > following patch, please?
> > 
> > Do we really want to silence this?  Isn't warning about it kind of the
> > point?  Your network is probably sucking if this happens...
> 
> What can user do about it? Is the low level memory allocator message
> very much usefull for him?  Maybe we can add a printk_once in the fail
> path with some more useful and virtio specific message.

That's an argument against ever printing any message.

What we need to know is why does this happen with virtio_net and not other
cards?  If it happens to them too, and they silently fall back, all good.

I want to make sure we're not papering over a real problem...

Thanks,
Rusty.