Re: [patch 1/5] mm: add nofail variants of kmalloc kcalloc and kzalloc

Peter Zijlstra
2010-08-25T21:27:57Z

On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 14:11 -0700, David Rientjes wrote:
>
> There's still no hard guarantee that the memory will allocatable
> (GFP_KERNEL, the compaction, then GFP_ATOMIC could all still fail), but I
> don't see how continuously looping the page allocator is possibly supposed
> to help in these situations.

Why do you think I'm a proponent of that behaviour?

I've been arguing that the existance of GFP_NOFAIL is the bug, and I
started the whole discussion because your patchset didn't outline the
purpose of its existance, it merely changes __GFP_NOFAIL usage into
$foo_nofail() functions, which on its own is a rather daft change.

Optimizing the page allocator by removing those conditional from its
innards into an outer loop not used by most callers seems a fine goal,
but you didn't state that.

Also, I like the postfix proposed by Andi better: _i_suck() :-)