Re: [patch v2 1/5] mm: add nofail variants of kmalloc kcalloc and kzalloc

David Rientjes
2010-09-05T23:04:05Z

On Fri, 3 Sep 2010, Neil Brown wrote:

> I'm actually a bit confused about this too.
> I thought David said he was removing a branch on the *slow* path - which make
> sense as you wouldn't even test NOFAIL until you had a failure.
> Why are branches on the slow-path an issue??

They aren't necessarily an issue in the performance sense, this is a
cleanup series since all converted callers to using these new functions
(and the eventual removal of __GFP_NOFAIL entirely) are using the bit
unnecessarily since they all have orders that implicitly loop in the page
allocator forever already, with or without the flag.