Re: 2.6.15-rc1-mm2 -- Bad page state at free_hot_cold_page (in process 'aplay', page c18eef30)

[Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>]

On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Russell King wrote:
> 
> Does this mean that in arch/arm/mm/consistent.c, we should also set
> __GFP_COMP ?  Should we be doing that today?

No, I don't believe so.  I notice there's use of PageReserved and page
count manipulation in there, which we may well want to rationalize in
a later phase, perhaps replacing by __GFP_COMP then; but I don't see
any need to change what you're doing at this stage.

Looking again, to see why you even thought you might need to change:
the vital thing you're doing (aside from the PageReserved, which is
becoming irrelevant), which is missing from the regular high-order
allocation, is the set_page_count(page, 1).  That's why you don't
need to change: the problems I was writing of come from when the
0-order page count goes down to 0.

Makes me wonder whether there could be a useful halfway stage to
compound pages, whether it would help for the page allocator to
set those counts to 1 generally.

Hugh


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