Re: [PATCH 0/2] mm/shrinker: make unregister_shrinker() less fragile

[Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky.work@gmail.com>]

On (07/13/15 02:03), Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 03:52:53PM +0900, Sergey Senozhatsky wrote:
> > Why? In some sense, shrinker callbacks are just a way to be nice.
> > No one writes a driver just to be able to handle shrinker calls. An
> > ability to react to those calls is just additional option; it does
> > not directly affect or limit driver's functionality (at least, it
> > really should not).
> 
> No, they are not just nice.  They are a fundamental part of memory
> management and required to reclaim (often large) amounts of memory.

Yes. 'Nice' used in a sense that drivers have logic to release the
memory anyway; mm asks volunteers (the drivers that have registered
shrinker callbacks) to release some spare/wasted/etc. when things
are getting tough (the drivers are not aware of that in general).
This is surely important to mm, not to the driver though -- it just
agrees to be 'nice', but even not expected to release any memory at
all (IOW, this is not a contract).

	-ss

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